Re: Re[2]: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001 23:05:18 +0530, Ashutosh Agarwal said:
> I personally would like to receive some kind of ACK from the person whom I
> am trying to send a mail....so that I am rest assured that the mail has

Some of us do *NOT* like getting 15 or 20 such messages from people we have
never heard of, just because we post to the IETF or Bugtraq or Incidents
mailing lists.  How many responses did you get to *your* posting?  The IETF
list is relatively "clean" this week - but I *have* had days when I have
gotten over *200* of these "Out of Clue AutoReply" in *ONE DAY*.

And not one single solitary one was a result of a direct mail to that
recipient - all 200 were nice replies to things I posted to the list.
Over and over and over.  I post 4 times in one day, these things are
nice enough to tell me 4 times that day that yes, George is STILL out
of the office and will be for the next week.  Never mind that it:

1) it SHOULD keep track of who it replied to and not reply AGAIN for
this invocation of "out of office".

2) it SHOULD NOT reply to mailing list postings.

There *is* RFC2298 on how to get an ACK from the mail system.
And guess what - it specifically says to not auto-reply if the origin seems
to be a mailing list.  From section 2.1:

   MDNs SHOULD NOT be sent automatically if the address in the
   Disposition-Notification-To header differs from the address in the
   Return-Path header (see RFC 822 [2]).  In this case, confirmation
   from the user SHOULD be obtained, if possible.  If obtaining consent
   is not possible (e.g., because the user is not online at the time),
   then an MDN SHOULD NOT be sent.

/Valdis