[Mailman-Developers] Query regarding auto_reply mechanism

[Mark Sapiro]

On 03/11/2015 11:52 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Aanand Shekhar Roy writes:
> 
>  > Please ignore the above mail, it was sent on 5th march, i dont know
>  > why it came today .
> 
> These things happen in Internet mail, through no fault of anybody in
> particular.  Don't worry about it.  The courtesy notice is helpful
> though, thank you!
> 
> On the other hand, figuring out *why* it happened on a Mailman list
> would be a good exercise for a new Mailman developer. :-)


Actually, It didn't happen 'on a Mailman list'. And it did happen also
to the follow-up message and Steve's reply.

The issue is that the server's MTA has some rules for holding or
discarding messages based on regexp matches against the message's headers.

In this case, the string auto-reply in the Subject: caused the messages
to be put in Postfix's HOLD queue where they sat for some time before
being released. You will note I changed that to auto_reply in this reply.

The particular regexp should probably be more restrictive. Presumably it
is intended to catch "out of office" type messages. I'm not sure what a
better regexp would be, but I don't control the Postfix configuration on
this server anyway.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan