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

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Author: David Woodhouse
Date:  
To: Tony Finch
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] Stopping out-of-office auto-reply mail loops
On Sun, 2004-01-25 at 15:24 +0000, Tony Finch wrote:
> This argument is covered by draft-moore-auto-email-response-04 which
> should be published as an RFC soon. It says:


Hmmm. Thanks for that reference. It was about time something like that
was published -- there's clearly a _lot_ of broken autoresponders out
there, and a lot of people really don't seem to understand the problem.

One thing that concerns me is §3.3...

Since in most cases it is not appropriate to respond to an
automatic response, and the responder is not interested in delivery
status messages, a MAIL FROM address of <> MAY be used for this
purpose.

That really should have been a MUST, in my opinion. Although I admit I
expected it to have been beaten down by users of broken MTAs such as
Lotus Notes to a SHOULD. I'm amazed it's only a 'MAY' though... is there
a reason for that?

It's a little inconsistent that it's RECOMMENDED to use NOTIFY=NEVER,
which translates when sending to non-DSN-aware servers as MAIL FROM:<>
but it's not even RECOMMENDED to just use MAIL FROM:<> in the first
place.

--
dwmw2