Karl Zander wrote:
Is there something specific Mailman is looking for to detect autoreponders, like Out of Office messages? We had an incident this weekend with an autoresponder sending an out of office message over and over and over....to a list.
[...]
But I am not sure what Mailman looks at when trying to determine what is an out of office or other automatic message.
As far as posting to a list is concerned, Mailman is looking for an X-BeenThere: header with the list address. It does look at a Precedence: header and will not process commands from or autorespond to Precedence 'bulk', 'junk' or 'list' messages, but it will forward them to the list if they aren't held, rejected or discarded for some other reason. It doesn't specifically try to identify autoresponses.
I would say the autoresponder is broken if it is responding repeatedly to the same address on behalf of the same recipient. I would also say it's broken it it responds to the list for an individual message (not a digest) unless the list is anonymous and puts the list address in the From: of delevered posts. Finally, this is probably more controversial, but I think it's broken if it can't identify its own autoresponses from Message-ID: or something else and not respond to one of its own messages.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan