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Re: No misdirected 'vacation' messages

2004-02-06 10:36:51


On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Martin Duerst wrote:
- Users want both their and other people's absence/vacation messages
   to go to the right place (e.g. original sender of a mail rather than
   a whole mailing list).

This is too specific for user goals.

Why? It may be a minor goal, but I don't see why this can't be listed.

I did not say its a minor goal (you did :), I said its too specific and 
needs to be generalized as standartized vacation messages is just one of 
the variation of what could be accomplished if there was mechanism to 
inform the sender (preferably during smtp session) about changes to status
of mail account and how long this "status" would remain in effect. 

 - Users want to be able to specify (in standard way) information about
temporary and/or permanent changes to their email configuration and
timeframe for these changes

This only speaks about the user who is on vacation. I was also
speaking about other users, in particular those that send mail
to users on vacation, or those that send mail to mailing lists
with users on vacation.

Actually that speaks about everyone - especially those who send email to 
those who are on vacation. And as for mail list problems, this is basicly 
a result (effect) of current non-standard vacation messages and that mail 
lists are also non-standard and setup in different ways. If we remove the 
cause, the effect would be gone as well.

This comes to more general questions of cause vs effects.
In the list of goals we have, we may have both, but we should try to 
attempt to work on causes first and if we can not be 100% sure that cause 
can be elimited, only then work on effects. Another way of looking it at 
is "sender" vs "recepient" rules if we known certain rules can be specified
such that all senders will follow them (and vacation message given 
standard mechanism is something I would expect senders will follow; 
unlike spam where even if we tell advertiser they have to label their 
message as UNSOLICITED email, only minority would follow it).

---
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net


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