As holiday season is approaching, people have extra opportunities to
show off just how incompetent their home grown (or even commercial)
attempts at producing autoreply or vacation systems are.
Please note that misconfigured autoreplies earn you an immediate
exclusion from the mailing list. Additionally this year the best
examples will be put up for display later.
Just to make things very clear about this, autoreplies should:-
- reply to the envelope sender of a message, not the From:
line and not some other random header data (if the envelope
sender is <> then it should not reply).
- send replies with the envelope sender set to <> - ie
they should be marked as bounce messages (this prevents
mailing loops)
- only reply to messages personally addressed to the
recipient (ie recipient should appear in To/Cc)
- not reply to mailing list and similar mail - ie check
the Precedence: header and not reply to list/bulk/etc
- rate limit replies - ie only send one reply per week to
any single address
- work very hard at avoiding loops
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@??? ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000 Fax +44 1423 858866 ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
