[Mailman-Users] Vacation email loop

[Nigel Metheringham]

On Fri, 2001-11-02 at 23:37, Greg Ward wrote:
> I believe that "stupid autoresponders" is one of the canonical reasons
> why reply-to "the list" is Considered Harmful.  IOW, if you insist on
> having reply-to "the list", you will probably have to live with this
> annoyance.

Stupid autoresponders appear to be endlessly inventive - matched in
ingenuity only by stupid virus scanners (which reinject scanned mail
into a system with the wrong recipients).

Autoresponders manage to come up with ways of re-injecting mail to
mailing lists even when reply-to list is not set (although setting list
reply-to is a good way of provoking them, and hideously bad for other
reasons).

I wonder if its possible to come up with a better set of filters in the
Mailman pipeline to pick up bad autoresponders automatically and push
their output to the moderation queue.  It would then be useful to have a
couple more options on the moderation interface:-
  - this user/autoreply pattern is OK
  - this user has a broken autoresponder - suspend them
  - this user has a broken autoresponder - unsub them
  - this user has a broken autoresponder - ban them permanently
    from the list server (including ubsub from all lists)
[I would like to have the nuke option too, but this appears subject to
network infrastructure requirements at present]


	Nigel.