Dan,
thanks for your comments. I agree with most of them.
In 1.1, the description of Group Responders should include an
example of a service address (support(_at_)example(_dot_)com), which you
mentioned in some email threads but isn't described directly
here in the I-D itself. The virus scanner is one example,
but the autoresponder for service addresses is a better (and
more common) example.
I'm not sure what you mean here. How is an autoresponder for
service addresses an example of a Group Responder, unless
it answers on behalf of several different recipients in a
way over which those recipients don't have control?
(or do I need to tweak my definition of Group Repsonder?
IMHO, recipient control over the response is the primary
thing that distinguishes Group from Personal responses)
My employer, and many others, have both externally-visible
addresses which run scripts that assign a case number
to your email and usually attempt to route the message (based
on its content or key words) into a problem-tracking system
or routes the message via email to groups of technical-
support or product-information specialists. For example,
if you email Canon and include in the message body the word
Camera, your email will be routed to product-information
specialists who know Canon's photography products. Instead,
if you had included the word "copier", your message would
have been routed differently.
In both cases, however, you send your message to info(_at_)canon(_dot_)com
and receive back one message indicating a tracking number,
a phone number you can call to check on your question (if so
desired), and an indication that 'your message has been routed
to the appropriate group to respond to your question'.
Many companys utilize autoresponders for their support@
and info@ addresses.
The recipients of the messages (which are routed and forwarded
by the autoresponders, typically with the tracking number
now included in the Subject line for easy coorelation by
the same autoresponder software), have no control over the
autoresponder -- thus, it's a "Group Autoresponder" per your
definition.
it sounds like I do need to tweak my definition then -
this kind of autoresponder is apparently not intercepting
mail that was addressed to large numbers of people
at the company, it's taking mail that was sent to specific
addresses and forwarding it to people at the company.
so I need to figure out where it best fits into the taxonomy
I'm only asking that you include an example of the above in
addition to your virus-scanner example.
it sounds reasonable to include this as an example, though
perhaps not of a Group Responder. maybe it's better treated
as something else.
and your autoresponder responds with:
Return-Path: <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
To: dwing(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com
From: moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu
Subject: Keith is out of the office
auto-submitted: auto-replied
Keith has received your message with subject:
=?encoded-word?=
and will read it when he returns.
oh that. yes, I agree that these need to be decoded.
<END OF MESSAGE>
when it should do something different with the Subject -- either it needs to
use
the same charset as the RFC2047-encoded subject (unlikely), or it should omit
the Subject entirely if the Subject's charset isn't the same charset as the
autoreply.
that's the nice thing about just prepending "Auto-Re: " - there's no need
for a user agent that just does that to do any parsing or decoding
of encoded-words.
Section 3 says:
An automatic responder MUST NOT send a response
for every message received.
This requirement will break all mailing list software
(majordomo, LISTSERV, etc.), as they're supposed to
send a response for every message received.
are they really supposed to send a response to spam or viruses?
that's why I say that in practice every responder needs some
filtering to make sure the input is valid.
Then:
An automatic responder MUST include mechanisms which
prevent or reduce the effects of responding to malicious
use or spam. Such mechanisms ard described in this
section.
maybe. I still think it's valid to say that all responders need
to decide whether to respond - it's just something you need to
think about when you're writing a responder. but it could certanly
use some clarification.
Keith