| Subject: Re: sieve: vacation extension
| Vacation has to respond to the MAIL FROM address or Return-Path address,
| not to the Reply-To/From header.
Is that specified somewhere? RFC822 requires that automated replies go
to the address in Reply-To:/From:.
This "requirement" of RFC822 has long been understood to be an _extremely_ bad
idea. It came about as a result of thinking of RFC822 in a vacuum, which isn't
how RFC822 is really used.
This statement is specifically overridden by RFC1123 in the case of failure
notifications; RFC1123 should have made it clear that this applies to any form
of automatic notification, but unfortunately did not do so, probably because at
the time the similarities between all forms of automatic responses weren't well
understood. RFC1891-4 make it clear that the MAIL FROM must be used for all
types of notifications, and the only reason vacation notices aren't included in
this set is that the WG could not reach consensus on various other aspects of
them. The need for vacation notices to go to the MAIL FROM address was never in
doubt, however.
In any case, this RFC822 recommendation has been dropped from the revised
version of the specification that the DRUMS WG has produced, and I believe the
revised SMTP document makes it clear that automatic notices should always be
sent to the MAIL FROM address.
But, the standard vacation program
replies to the MAIL FROM address, it looks like...
Indeed it does, and this is a Good Thing.
Ned