Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com>]

--On Friday, 29 June, 2001 09:02 -0700 "Paul Hoffman / IMC"
<phoffman at imc.org> wrote:

> Steve, we'll forgive you for not being an email expert. If you
> were  one, you would know that this topic, and half a dozen of
> related  meta-topics, have been beaten to death in the
> (finally dead!) DRUMS  WG, and on the ietf-822 mailing list in
> the past six or seven years.  A summary is that some
> implementations prefer to be strictly  standards-compliant but
> piss off their users by not doing enough,  while others choose
> to do things the users want even though it  doesn't go
> strictly by the standards. In this case, there are 
> non-standard headers in common use that give valuable
> heuristics to  programs, and no standard ones that give the
> same information. Many  companies, apparently including
> Microsoft, use that non-standard  information.

Paul, while I generally agree with your description of the
problem, we _do_ have a standard in this case.   RFC 2919
specifies some list-specific special headers.  From episodic
examinations of messages arriving here from various lists, it
has gotten reasonably well implemented, almost certainly enough
so to  promote it to Draft Standard if someone does the work in
the next few months.   And nothing prevents a receiving MTA from
observing the presence of those fields and using that
information to suppress vacation/ out-of-office messages even
if, for historical reasons, they also consider Precedence fields
(or whatever).

   john