At 01:58 PM 6/3/2002 -0400, Lawrence Greenfield wrote:
>The Sieve vacation draft (now expired) explicitly mandates that the
>vacation response messages be sent to the envelope from address
>("Return-path"). In practice, we haven't had any complaints about
>this behavior.
I suspect you haven't been sampling adequately. Most of the people I know
are quite irritated with getting such notices, unless they have explicitly
cited the recipient in To or CC.
I'm sorry, let me rephrase: "In practice, we haven't had any
complaints about vacation responses going to the envelope from address
and not the reply-to address."
Vacation messages to the envelope from address are easier to reason
about. I suspect they're much less likely to cause mail loops.
>We do receive complaints about the check for the recipient's address
>in the To/Cc header lines.
Complaints from whom? The people who get vacation notices when they send
to a mailing list?
Complaints from the people who set the vacation messages and want
their messages to go to everybody who sends them mail directly or
indirectly. I hate vacation messages from mailing lists, and I agree
with the To/Cc test for responses. But not everyone agrees with us.
Luckily I don't sell my software and don't have to be responsive to
customer complaints.
A mailing list would rewrite the envelope-from address. So vacation
notices sent to envelope-from wouldn't be seen by the person posting
to the mailing list, nor would the vacation notice appear as a
'post' on the mailing list itself.
In my experience, the safest vacation notice is one that only
responds if you're on the To/CC, _and_ sends the vacation notice
to the envelope-from address -- using the envelope-from is consistent
with non-delivery notifications.
-d