brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (02/24/90)
How many different 'vacation' style mail bouncing programs are there out there? Is there any way to defeat them? I have discovered that if you manage a mailing list, you are bound to get a lot of these replies, and it's costly and annoying. Is there any special header that any of them support to stop the flow? I suppose reply-to would work, but that is not always an alternative. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
jef@well.sf.ca.us (Jef Poskanzer) (02/26/90)
There are quite a few versions of "vacation" and vacation-like programs.
And yes, a lot of them do reply to messages from mailing lists even though
they shouldn't. Hell, lots of them aren't even smart enough to keep a
list of people already notified, or to add a header line marking the
message as coming from a vacation program, let alone not reply to a
message so marked.
When I send out a digest and get a vacation message back, I send mail
to the vacationer and the site's postmaster letting them know that the
version of vacation they are using is not acceptable. And if I get a
second vacation message from that site, I remove it from my mailing list.
---
Jef
Jef Poskanzer jef@well.sf.ca.us {ucbvax, apple, hplabs}!well!jef
Alcohol 0% by volume.karl@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (02/26/90)
brad@looking.on.ca writes:
I have discovered that if you manage a mailing list, you are bound to
get a lot of these replies, and it's costly and annoying. Is there
any special header that any of them support to stop the flow?
The semi-standard "vacation" that comes with sendmail will not respond
if the address from which the note comes is *-request*, or if there is
a header "Precedence: bulk" or "Precedence: junk" present.
Make sure your list goes out with one or both of these attributes and
you'll get surprisingly few vacation notes.
Of course, convincing list maintainers to make sure that lists are
properly managed for these features is darn near impossible.
--karl
--
Nihil carborundum illegitimus.
Yes, it's an "I've got an attitude about the users" sort of week:
"The intelligence of the average student is inversely proportional to
the length of the time spent at the institution." --Placeway's Maximjohn@loverso.leom.ma.us (John Robert LoVerso) (02/26/90)
The `most recent' vacation, part of 4.3BSD-tahoe and ftp'able from uunet.uu.net:/bsd-sources/src/ucb/vacation.tar.Z, doesn't return a message unless the recipient is explicitly mentioned in a To: or Cc: line, and then only sends the response back to the sender of the original message. Using anything else is just anti-social. John