Keith Moore writes:
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....
The example I posted, "auto-submitted: auto-generated; generator=sophos;
type=antivirus". Where should it go? Is it reasonable in the first
place? Markus has presented a case that such details are useful - a
sufficient case?
Content-Type is about the content's format, not about its nature. That
is to say, it's text/plain rather than text/essay or text/autoresponse.
Content-Description is unstructured human-readable text which IMO makes
it unusable.
Content-Disposition is about how the receiver should present the
message, e.g. a suggested filename for a file. I suppose something like
"type=antivirus" might go here, since the purpose of that is to enable
appropriate disposition (AKA file in /dev/null).
I've seen X-Mailer and User-Agent, but can't summon much enthusiasm for them.
So if an autoresponder wants to say something about which generator
auto-generated a message, auto-submitted seems the right place. The
"type" could go either here or in content-disposition, both seem about
equally appropriate to me, depending on whether the "type" is seen as
the type of responder or the type of response.
--Arnt