[ On Friday, January 23, 2004 at 10:03:14 (+0000), David Woodhouse wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [Exim] Stopping out-of-office auto-reply mail loops
>
> Autoreplies should only ever be sent to the SMTP reverse-path;
That is very _VERY_ wrong.
A proper out-of-office/vacation autoresponder is what's called a "mail
agent". Such programs _should_ behave exactly as a user using a proper
MUA would behave. I.e. they _should_ follow all of the rules for
finding a reply address in the RFC [2]822 headers of the message being
replied to.
The most important thing any mail agent _should_ be doing is restricting
the frequency at which it sends a reply to any given destination
address. For "vacation" autoresonders the most appropriate delay
between responses is at least 7 days. All of the other rules I posted
are merely for reducing the annoyances that can be caused by such mail
agents.
The sender address is an unauthenticated (and unauthenticatable) address
that _should_ only ever be used by an MTA as the destination for notices
about the non-delivery of a message that MTA had taken responsibility
for delivering.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods@???>
Planix, Inc. <woods@???> Secrets of the Weird <woods@???>
