> Yes, I figured that -- but what I guess I was thinking about was that
> I remember, a few years ago, storms of "out of office" replies
> responding to each other and choking lists.  I'm presuming there's a
> convention to prevent that.

Personally I've never heard of that happening. The only thing that comes to
mind is dup checking and I think that has been around longer than a few
years.

> If my LISTSERV were configured to send
> such replies to the list address rather than the individual, it seems
> to me it would happen all the time.

Read on..

> Okay, but what's preventing me from setting my list to distribute them
> to all the subscribers, thus prompting the list to get flooded with
> "out of office" replies?  (It's not my sophisticated understanding of
> the differences between Reply-To: and Sender: and so forth, I can
> assure you of that . . . )

The auto-responder may not function like a mail client, in that it may not
reply to the Reply-To: address if one is present. It may only reply to one set
field. This field may be built-in and it may be user configurable, I just don't
know since I never used one. Whatever the case, they are not all alike or set
the same way.

If you had say List,Respect set and the responder was setup to send replies
to the reply-to  address of messages. In one message the reply will go to the
list since the poster did not have a reply-to set in his/her client. The the next
post may be from a user with the reply-to set, in this case the responders
reply would go privately to that users reply-to address.

In a situation where all replies from an auto-responder are going to a list
from a particular user, (your Reply-To=  and/or the auto-responders
configuration make this happen),  after the first one made it to the list, the
others should be rejected as dups. Provided of course they didn't change the
text of the auto-response. Again, the bottom line is you can't set your list(s)
to handle all auto-responders and you shouldn't concern yourself with them
in that regard. Prevention through education of the subscribers works well
here. Perhaps a paragraph in your Welcome message or List
Guidelines/Rules?

--
John Lyon
L-Soft international, Inc.
http://www.lsoft.com