[Mailman-Users] Filter vacation messages?

[Mark Sapiro]

Michael Schaarwaechter wrote:
>
>my problem: I can't recognize a vacation message going to a mailman list
>just by taking a look at the header. The Mime type filtering doesn't
>help, too. I just need a possibility to filter by the content of the
>message. I want to hold back messages saying "am not in the office" and
>so on.
>
>Has anybody done this already and can give me a hint?

I haven't done it. I don't know if anyone has. If you can figure out
how via regexp matching on the message subject or body or some other
way to identify these autoresponse messages, it would be simple enough
to add code to Mailman/Handlers/Hold.py to deal with them.

In fact, if you could identify them by matching the subject against a
regexp, you could just use Privacy options...->Spam
filters->header_filter_rules to deal with them. If you try this and
come up with an effective rule, please let us know.


The problem as I see it is that these autoresponses seem to be entirely
free form and while a human reader can obviously recognize them for
what they are, I'm not smart enough to figure out how to recognize
them programmatically. What is really needed is a standard header
which if present says the message is an autoresponse. I'm not aware of
such, and even if a standard were developed (say an extension to
RFC2822) requiring such a header, it would be almost forever before
all autoresponders complied with it.

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