Re: [Exim] Stopping out-of-office auto-reply mail loops

> Ah, thank you. I have been thinking quite a bit about this
> vacation/auto-reply stuff for a while now and still can't seem to fully make
> up my mind about where it should be sent to.

How about just forwarding the user's email to someone else while they're on
vacation?

> Some say the From: or Reply-To: headers (which can make sense), but then I
> think about these possibly being faked, or if someone is spammed (not high
> enough to be discarded/dropped) and has a vacation message on, using these
> fields could result in a bunch of emails sent out to faked addresses.
>
> Others say the envelope sender, which makes sense too - possilby more than
> others. If emails were sent to this, (I believe it's $return_path I'm
> referring to, not the $sender_address or whatever) it would avoid sending to
> bouncebacks (empty address, so it's discarded) automatically, and if a list
> send a message, although annoying, only one message would get sent to the
> list, thus everyone would know and you wouldn't send duplicates (rather than
> just a message to every individual user). It could also avoid the high
> volume possibly created by spam (although I have no idea how spam software
> works, so I don't know if it would use different envelope senders).
>
> Currently I'm thinking of using the $return_path variable, mainly because
> it's a lot easier, and somewhat safer than using $header_from: (or at least
> making some kind of long winded ${if ...} test based on from: and reply-to:
> headers like a MUA should pick from).

This may help a little. If the recipient's email address is not listed as
the To: or CC: lines, don't send autoreplies. That would virtually remove
all mailing lists from auto replies and lots of spam. Granted not all spam
would be stopped that way. It (if there's no virus checking) would prevent
replies to virii.

> (BTW, sorry for my top posts - Outlook's only good message format is top
> posting :()

IIRC, pine will work on windows. Or mozilla. Don't use outlook, it has
enough bugs as it is.

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