On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 06:04:50PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On , December 13, 2001 at 12:40:59 (+0000), Nigel Metheringham wrote: ]
> > Subject: [Exim] Administrivia - Christmas is coming, the autoreplies are getting fat
> >
> > 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
>
> I most strongly disagree with that advice. An autoreply tool is an
> agent operating on behalf of the user and MUST therefore reply in the
> same way the user would reply, i.e. normally using "reply-to:", or if
> there is none, the "from:" contents.
Uh?
Err, my understanding has always that an unattended reply is always supposed
to go the envelope sender, among other things to prevent loops when too
autoresponders are talking to one another in unexpected situations like a
stupid autoresponder that would eat an X-Loop header I insert and not insert
any precedence headers.
That's why any good autoresponder also sets the envelope to null
> Sending an auto-reply to the transport layer envelope address when such a
> reply is intended to reach the human originator of an incoming message is
> just plain WRONG (and won't always work either!).
If you say so...
With SMTP callback enabled, you very have good chances that the envelope
sender is going to reach someone, the user who sent the mail, or the admin
address that was often substituted for the exact purpose of catching bounces
and autoreponders.
Regardless of what you say, many people have used the envelope sender and
pointed it elsewhere with the understanding that all bounces and automated
replies will go there.
If you are on vacation, and your vacation program is broken and can't tell
that the message came from a list, it should absolutely not reply to the
poster of the message, it should go, again, to the envelope sender where the
MLM can deal with it.
ezmlm does a superb job of it, and work is being put in mailman to have it
deal with soft and hard bounces with VERP too.
So, yes, I completely agree with Miguel, and all the people who are already
relying on this behavior: autoresponders should go to the envelope sender,
like any other automated answer (and the envelope set to null in the
process to avoid loops for good)
> Note that sending autoreplies to the envelope sender address of message
> is also a sure way to get a flood of them in any list manager's mailbox.
Err, no. Niguel did mention looking at Precedence: bulk/list and the
vacation recipe on exim also does this:
user_vacation:
driver = localuser
require_files = ${local_part}:${home}/.vacation.msg
# do not reply to errors or lists
senders = " ! ^.*-request@.*:\
! ^owner-.*@.*:\
! ^postmaster@.*:\
! ^listmaster@.*:\
! ^mailer-daemon@.*"
# do not reply to errors and bounces or lists
condition = "${if or {{match {$h_precedence:} {(?i)junk|bulk|list}} \
{eq {$sender_address} {}}} {no} {yes}}"
> I don't know about all the other transports which support envelope
> sender addresses, but certainly with SMTP the ONLY valid use of the
> envelope sender address is to return delivery status notifications.
I don't see why it should be certain at all...
Marc
--
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
.... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page:
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