Markus Stumpf writes:
On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 05:43:52PM +0100, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
> IMHO a personal responder (vacation) should send the message to the
>From field.
Do that, and the document die as irate mailing-list posters complain
about having received vacation messages whenever they post to a
list.
As outlined in the draft vaction programs should never answer to posts
from a mailing list ;-)
Yep. IMO, in the best case, there'll be a five-year transition until 99%
of responders are "good". Can't have too much pain during that
transition.
So add a list that lists the pro's and con's of each field. Just
because there are controversal opinions is not a reason to drop the
topic at all.
It is, IMHO. An RFC that draws too many flames is not an RFC that'll be
implemented widely and well.
Feel free to suggest text changes/additions.
Achieve agreement on what the rules should be?
If there are rules there would be something a programmer of a vacation
type program could stick to.
And disagree visciously about. Recently, X-* fields were mentioned on
this list. Apparently, people disagreed so viciously that RFC 2822
finally came out without any mention of x-*.
Broken stuff won't go away. But please, let's have a document that won't
be ignored because some parts are flame-worthy, or held up because it
attempts to specify too much. Let's have something modest and good.
It's always possible to supplement it with a later vacation
specification.
Inappropriate, IMO. Too much of a special case, and besides, you
don't want to ignore a whole category just like that.
You mean something that makes 90% of all "responder" traffic at times
is an "inappropriate special case"? ;-)
Yes. Just like it would be an inappropriate special case to say
"Content-type: antivirus-warning".
The same could however be achieved with
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated; antivirus W32/Sobig-F
and maybe antivirus vendors will take it up in a way like that but
then we'd have 30 different semi-standarized comment fields ;-)
That would be much better, but I'm still not quite persuaded. That seems
to be turning auto-submitted towards being a hierarchical
specification, which fits badly in its environment.
Perhaps the auto-submitted "parameter" could be elaborated a little,
mentioning two optional parameters, "generator" and "type", and saying
that "type" is "antivirus", "vacation", "new-ticket" or something else,
and generator is a string describing the product.
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated; type=antivirus; generator="sophos blah".
That would be very like e.g. content-type and content-disposition.
--Arnt