Quoth Greg A. Woods on Fri, Aug 11, 2000:
> I've always considered vacation messages to be replies, not bounces, and
> indeed since the "out-of-office" reply is a really a status message to
> set expectations about a more specific reply it *MUST* be sent to the
> same address(es) which would be expecting a real reply.
But there's a problem with the mailing lists, which you indicate
below. In particular, say that someone replies to the message I
sent to a mailing list, sending the reply both to me and to the
maling list (therefore triggering the "personal" condition in
Exim), setting the Reply-To: header to the address of the list.
The vacation message will be sent to the list in this case.
> That is to say a "vacation" program is really just an automated user
> agent, not a transport,
Hmm. Weird definition. But then, given your domain...
> An out-of-office reply sent to the $sender_address may not reach the
> people expecting a reply, particularly in this day and age where people
> often use outgoing mail relays (eg. their dial-up ISP account, or some
> web based mailer) that are not associated directly with their own
> domains.
In this case, they can never receive bounce messages. And if
they cannot receive bounces, they've got a bigger problem than
inability to receive vacation messages. In my opinion, vacation
messages may be treated as bounce messages, and a sender should
be equally willing to know about his mail not reaching the
recipient and the recipient not being able to read his mail.
And vacation messages should be sent from empty address <>, like
bounce messages, so no mailing loops will be created in case that
both the original sender and the original recipient set vacation
messages. In short, I think that vacation messages are like
bounce messages.
> The tricky part is in dealing with mailing lists where the rules,
> especially if you only read RFC 822, are somewhat more difficult to get
> a good understanding of (for example I *want* replies to this message to
> go only to the list, since I don't want duplicates, and thus I
> explicitly set the Reply-To: header).
Which is a clearly bad thing to do. If I want to reply to you
personally to a message you sent to a list, I don't want my reply
to be sent to the list.
Vadik.
--
Strange Fruit. A brilliant way to describe
somebody hanging from a tree...
-- Marcus Miller
