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Re: I-D Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail

2002-06-06 09:01:47


Keith Moore wrote:

I think the scope of the document is about right - one of the things
I've constantly seen every time the subject has come up in the past
10 years or so is that arguments about how one kind of responder should
work keep getting applied to other kinds of responders, whether
it makes sense or not.  the point of having the scope as broad as it
is is to make it clear that different kinds of responders should have
different behavior.   and if those different behaviors aren't adequately
distinguished in the current document, well it's just a -00 version.

The behavior is so different for every potential application that you
rapidly run into the exception-for-every-rule problem, especially in the
context of universal auto-responder rules. All rules need to be prefaced
with "unless the app needs X, don't do X"

I would also think that a universal spec needs to be targetted towards
BCP, with no mandatory rules, no new on-the-wire formats (eg, new header
fields or mime types), and very generic recommendations such as "use
Return-Path when possible" and "avoid exposing unnecessary information".
You will also need to disclaim that any of the recommendations might be
overridden by type-specific documents.

I'll give specific feedback later today.

One comment with file-robots is that the recipient needs to be verified
with a confirmation message before the data-dump begins (which is also
unique from other auto-response apps).

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/

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