Re: vacation programs, was BATV breaks rfc2821bis?

On Tue, 20 May 2008, John R Levine wrote:
> > If you're going to cast doubt on the choice of the envelope sender 
> > address, perhaps you could describe what you think the right choice is.
> For a vacation program, Reply-To: or lacking that From:.  You know, like 
> replying to a message in a MUA.  This is not an innovative design.
Sure sounds innovative (in the "newly introduced" sense) to me: the 
'vacation' program shipped with BSD has been using the envelope sender 
originally from the "From " separator line) for the entire 27 years of its 
existence.  The 'formail' program has been generating autoreplies for 
vacation message that go to the envelope sender since at least 1999 (and 
before then it only misrouted messages with Resent-* fields).

> > I should mention that the behavior you describe, where the vacation 
> > notice goes to the list management software which then treats it as a 
> > bounce sounds like the Right Thing to me
> Aw, come on.  Any vacation program that sends any response at all to 
> list mail is terminally broken.
Point of order!  *You're* the one that brought up vacation responses going 
to VERP addresses from mailing lists!  If "terminally broken" vacation 
programs are not worthy of consideration then then your *entire message* 
that I replied to was off-topic/out-of-scope!
As is, I no longer understand why you brought this topic up, as you 
apparently don't believe it matters.

Philip Guenther