On 11 Jul 2002 at 10:38, Newman, Liz wrote, in part:
> Our list members are saying that they are seeing each other's out of office
> replies.  Thought this was  taken care of several months ago, but have seen
> some turnover so can't trace problem on our end.  Any solutions?

A number come to mind...

First, don't allow list members to take vacations or otherwise be out of
the office. It's hard for superiors to verify they're actually doing
anything while out of the office, so I'm sure you'll have their support.

Second, if Out of Office (OoO) replies are coming to your lists, use the
new (1.8e) content filtering to bypass distributions.

Third, if OoO replies are going to list posters, a few steps are possible
(pick one). (1) Set the OoO subscriber to INDEX or DIGESTS, (2) Set the OoO
subscriber to NOMAIL, (3) Delete the subscription of the OoO subscriber,
(4) teach the OoO subscriber to do one of the above before heading to the
beach, and (5) teach your posters to report OoO messages to you so you can
take action to free future posters from their deluge of OoO messages. ;-)

Fourth, you might contact OoO reply-ers to se if they can set their e-mail
facilities to bypass the OoO reply when they receive messages with
"Precedence: list" in the header (LISTSERV 1.8e and later only).  I have no
idea if this can be successful at any meaningful rate ... but if you have a
corporate list with corporate subscribers and e-mail facilities, it is
probably worthwhile.

Hope this helps, wayne


Wayne T. Smith                         Systems Group - UNET
[log in to unmask]                 University of Maine System