To me, it makes little sense for the secretary to get DSNs and MDNs but
for the boss to get vacation notices. If the boss really wants to see
all of those responses, he can tell his secretary to configure the
secretary's MUA to use the boss's address in MAIL FROM.
I always try to use real life analogies.
The boss wants to send a letter. He tells the secretary to handle it.
The secretary puts the name of the boss on the paper and puts it in
a company envelope. If it's a return to sender the company gets it
and they look at the content and everything goes it's way. But the
other is more interesting now. The recipient is on vacation. His
secretary will open the letter, look at the content and she will write
back a latter to the "sender boss" telling that her boss in on vacation.
She will not address it to the senders' secreatry nor the senders
company. Right? ;-)
Yes, but the secretary's response is not an automatic one. furthermore,
the secretary writing the response will understand enough about the
content of the letter to know whether it's appropriate to respond, and
to form a response that's appropriate for the message.
Besides I think you missed the point of the argument in section 4.
It's not that From/Reply-to are likely to contain incorrect information,
it's that they exist for very different purposes than to specify the
destination of automatic responses.
No I didn't really. It was more the
*> The Return-Path address is really the only one from the message header
*> that can be expected, as a matter of protocol, to be suitable for
*> automatic responses that were not anticipated by the sender.
at which I looked with my antispam hat on. But then, with spam, what is
realiable.
if it can tell that the message is spam (or is not a valid message for
that kind of responder), the responder should not respond at all.
If it's not too late I'd definitely would vote for a third keyword
in "5.1 Syntax" and have "antivirus-generated" added. This would be
a huge benefit if antivirus vendors would add that (and probably in
the comment area the name of the virus).
This doesn't really seem consistent with the purpose of auto-submitted.
Hmmmm ... I don't understand what the inconsistency is.
auto-submitted doesn't want to be come a general-purpose message labelling
mechanism. arguably we have too many of those already. we could use
content-disposition or content-type or content-description....
- Another member of IRTF ASRG BCP mentioned:
> I'm a little concerned about the top of section 2
> "An automatic responder MUST NOT send a response for every
> message ..." while this is in a sense the whole thrust of the
> draft, I'd imagine that it sits badly with some applications -
> like forms of RPC over SMTP. Perhaps this is one to ask someone
> who knows SOAP etc?
So maybe a wording like
"An automatic responder MUST NOT _blindly_ send a response for
every message received."
can make that statement more clearer.
I understand your concern, but I guess I don't think your suggested text
is any clearer.
I didn't say it is perfect and it is surely easier for a native english
speaker to phrase it than for me, we only wanted to clarify out concerns
a bit.
Maybe, maybe not :) If I think of some better way to say it before the final
draft, I'll quite willingly change it.
Keith