On Fri, 20 Aug 1993 21:18:04 GMT "Richard W. Wiggins"
<[log in to unmask]> said:
>I disagree. If I set up a robot reply tool I would never want this tool,
>as my agent, posting to mailing lists
I have no problem with that - who the robot writes to and under what
conditions is clearly up to you. However, if you DO write such a robot,
it should identify its messages as being from a robot.
>I belong to a lot of mailing lists, some Listserv, some others, and I
>cannot think of a single mailing list that would want me to inform all
>the members of my absence for every message someone posts to the list.
I can think of a lot of mailing lists where I'd want a copy of your
vacation/sickness notice as list owner, and a handful of lists where I'd
want the whole list informed (once of course - most vacation programs
already know not to send multiple notices to any given address). Part of
my job is to run a network along with a small group of other people, and
we report all problems through internal lists, even when we know who is
going to have to fix it, so that everyone knows what is going on. We also
inform each other of vacations. If one of my colleagues forgot to do that
before leaving, I do want the vacation message distributed to everyone,
because it's important. We actually do that manually when it happens.
>Forgetting the auto-reply tool question, then it's the case that there
>is no suggested header that a user (or a robot) can key on to recognize
>that a piece of mail came from a mailing list manager?
/usr/ucb/vacation was designed with unix and sendmail in mind. It keys on
the obsolete '-request' string and a number of sendmailisms to detect
list mail. Adding a check for 'owner-' in both RFC822 header and "the
RFC822 From_" field as they call it (SMTP MAIL FROM:) would be a step in
the right direction, since this is what most lists are using nowadays. An
even better step would be to add 'X-Report-Type: auto-reply' to the
generated message. No, it's not standard, there is no standard for that,
but it works - it will prevent the message from being distributed by
LISTSERV and any other list manager that supports the LMail delivery
errors format.
Eric
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