[Mailman-Users] Feature request

Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham at vdata.co.uk
Fri Dec 17 11:07:01 CET 1999


> Barry A. Warsaw wrote:-
> >>>>> "MS" == Michael Sweeney <sweeney at projectcool.com> writes:
> 
>     MS> I would just as soon see a feature that would automatically
>     MS> unsubscribe (or at least disable) any address that sent mail
>     MS> from an autoresponder.
> 
> If you could actually figure out how to /recognize/ such a message,
> you could easily add a module to the new message processing
> architecture that would do exactly this.

Of course its even harder than that...
Everyone thinks that autoreplies are easy, and so there are dozens of 
implementations out there, most of which are totally broken.  So 
autorepliers break into 2 types:-

  1. Sane ones that follow the rules.  They will (generally) only
     autoreply to mail thats been sent to the specific address
     (so they may well autoreply to the monthly list password
     messages), but they will not autoreply to list messages.
     These ones are not a problem.

  2. Other autoreply systems.  All bets are off.  They can probably
     set up mail loops for you, they will be specially designed to
     work out the least appropriate address to send their output to
     and anything else that can cause you trouble.
     Practically by definition they are very hard to auto-detect!

One reference thats worth looking at on this is
  http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/users/reriksso/mail/autoresponder-faq.html

The writing style of that URL is not a good indication as to its 
technical content :-)

	Nigel.


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[ Nigel Metheringham                  Nigel.Metheringham at VData.co.uk ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]






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