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Re: (Aw*y For The Day) (Away For The Day)

2001-09-27 09:32:56
Hello,

This message is for Thursday 27 September 2001
                  through Monday 01 October 2001.

You have sent an email to this address, however, I am not in today.
I will check my email when I return and respond as time permits.
If this is urgent, please send the message to anna(_at_)fdbs(_dot_)com


procmail-users 09/27/01 09:01 >>>


How quaint, an autoreply to a mailing list about automated mail processing, 
as if everyone who uses procmail shouldn't know better, esp. if they 
bothered to subscribe to the list in the first place.

At 02:00 2001-09-27 -0700, Walter Werner wrote:
You have sent an email to this address, however, I am not in today.
I will check my email when I return and respond as time permits.
If this is urgent, please send the message to anna(_at_)fdbs(_dot_)com

:0
* ^From:(_dot_)*wally(_at_)fdbs(_dot_)com
* ^Subject:.*Away For The Day
trash

The second condition line is of course entirely optional in this case (it 
would depend on whether you consider attachments on this list nearly as 
annoying as the carelessness demonstrated by using vacation autoreplies).

Interestingly, the autoreply does not include an x-loop, and therefore is 
unlikely to check looping.  Does anyone see anything syntactically wrong 
with the following recipe, which of course, is totally unrelated to this 
incident:


# this could be rewritten to use a regexp or a grep type action against a
# file, then return the specific match address for use in the recipe below.
$ANNOYANCE=address(_at_)domain(_dot_)tld

:0
* ^From:.*$ANNOYANCE
{
         # Likewise, the Subject could be a regexp for several different
         # vacation/out-of-the-office autoreply lines.
         :0
         * ^Subject:.*Away For The Day
         * ! ^X-Loop: should\.have\.used\.one
         | ( formail -rt -a"X-Loop: should.have.used.one" \
            -I"Reply-To: $ANNOYANCE" \
            -I"From: boing.$ANNOYANCE" \
            -I"To: $ANNOYANCE" \
            -I"Subject: Got your message - please quit sending them." ) | \
            $SENDMAIL -t

         # Otherwise, still FROM this person, trash it.
         :0
         trash
}

The above specifically rewrites the To:, even though it is using -rt, which 
should pick up a reply address automatically (this way, we're unlikely to 
send our message somewhere THEIR autoreply might redirect it to - including 
ourselves or a list).  The -rt still deals with ditching the message body 
and most of the headers.  If you wanted to, you could delete the To: 
rewrite line and this would still works - you'd just be opening yourself to 
sending a reply somewhere you might not want to.  If you want to include a 
message body in your reply, you can add a ' ; cat 
path_to_bodyfile/autorepannoy.msg' (no quote tics), just inside the closing 
parenthesis of the formail.  You might include a list of conditions in 
which autoreplies shouldn't be sent - at the top of that list would be 
messages from known mailing lists, or where the recipient address doesn't 
appear in the To: field.

This will still arrive ENVELOPE-FROM your address, so the sender can easily 
enough determine who got peeved at them, but the object is so that their 
autoreply script doesn't attempt to send an autoreply in response to THIS 
message (at least, not to you anyway).  If your account is among the 
trusted sendmail users, you can add "-f boing.$ANNOYANCE" to the end of the 
sendmail invocation above, and that will change the envelope address as 
well (not that the host identified in the received headers won't be a 
giveaway).

This script isn't intended to mailbomb someone for regular messages - it is 
intended to hammer home the obnoxiousness of autoreplies sent for messages 
which were not directly addressed to the recipient, and, in the case of 
fools who write autoreply rules that blindly reply to all incoming 
messages, to perhaps give them reason to seriously consider whether they 
should ever want to autoreply again.

---
  Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

  Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
  Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.

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