Re: [exim] Out of Office and collateral spam

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Author: Michael Heydon
Date:  
To: Jeroen van Aart
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] Out of Office and collateral spam

Jeroen van Aart wrote:
> Phil (Medway Hosting) wrote:
>
>>> The vacation utility on unix seems smart enough to not be a nuissance
>>> and still be functional for those who need it.
>>>
>> I don't know that offhand but as long as it only sends to known contacts
>> then yes it would be ok to use.
>>
>
> To send to known contacts you need to have that stored somewhere. Seeing
> there are many different ways for email clients to store contacts it
> must be hard to implement. Perhaps you refer to addresses they sent
> emails to, which are in some (personalised) whitelist?
>
> The vacation program will not repeatedly email someone who already got a
> vacation reply from you. Neither will it email mailinglists. At least I
> have used it and didn't get kicked off of here and didn't see anything
> on the list. http://www.linuxmanpages.com/man1/vacation.1.php
>

The "once", "once_repeat" and "personal" conditions in exim filters
should perform in much the same way. Personally I haven't had much of a
problem with autoreplies. Most of our spam gets filtered at the server,
of what does get through most of it won't match the "personal"
requirement. We might send out 1 or 2 autoreplies to spam which is
unfortunate, but hardly the end of the world.

As someone who has had their address forged in spam, I can state that
the autoreplies don't bother me that much. If I email someone and they
aren't going to reply for a week or a month, I would like to know that
(messages saying "We think your message is spam" are something else
though). I don't really see a major difference between an autoreply and
a bounce message. Both tell me that my message isn't going to get read
(yet). On the occasions I have had my address forged I have recieved
several hundred bounce messages a couple of autoreplies, I delete them
along with the bounce messages and move on.
> Gretings,
> Jeroen
>
>

*Michael Heydon - IT Administrator *
michaelh@??? <mailto:michaelh@jaswin.com.au>