procmail
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Internet Mail Service - bogus vacation replies

1999-12-14 08:47:23
1999-12-14-01:48:40 Gary Funck:
My question:  (this is probably a smartlist question, actually).  Is
there something the email list software can add to the relayed
message to tell IMS to leave its hands off, and not to auto-reply?

That would be an IMS question --- is there anything it happens to be coded to
look for?

Is there something that IMS should be doing, like looking at
a Precedence: list, or Resent: header field of some sort, so that
disables its vacation reply?

Actually, in my examination of headers of a bunch of my own mailing list
archives, I found "Precedence: bulk" far more common --- probably over half
the lists set it; only one list seems to use "Precedence: list". I ended up
collecting an enormous bushel basket of headers when I tried coming up with
a vacation recipe that wouldn't blast mailing lists, and I'm sure it's still
incomplete. Additions requested! I attach a copy of the recipe.

And more to the point, is there anything I can look for in the
header, so my procmail recipe can ditch these bogus vacation
messages?  I think not, at least not if I want to restrict
the binning to only auto-replies to messages sent to a mailing
list.  Note how IMS did not preserve any of the original headers,
like X-loop and other such things originally inserted by the
e-mail list manager program.

I think you've answered the question. You can decide to look at them all, or
you can decide to look at none of them.

The only way to have code sort 'em into mailing list -vs- correspondent would
be to have a database kept based on your outgoing email, that tracks everyone
you've sent messages to, so it can decide whether you sent a note directly to
the person whose vacation processer is buzzing you now. Sounds like a lot of
work to me, I prefer to toss them all. If it wasn't composed and sent by a
human, I don't have time to read it. Computers are boring authors.

-Bennett

Attachment: procmailrc
Description: Text document

Attachment: pgpbHvMih1Edk.pgp
Description: PGP signature

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>