[Mailman-Users] Autoresponder and privacy

[Bernd Petrovitsch]

Hi!

On Mit, 2011-04-06 at 08:24 +0100, Clare Redstone wrote:
[...] 
> Thank you for replying so quickly. I don't understand some of the technical
> stuff to understand why 
> the autoresponder message came to me not the group. But am glad it did!

The mail headers are set up so that these type of mails do not go on the
mailing list. E.g. consider the case that an email address vanishes and
is still subscribed. You don't want the bounce on the ML too.

> Because we're a discussion group, I have MM set up for reply to the list.

That's an entirely different discussion but the standard answer is:
please read
http://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-harmful.html,
http://www.metasystema.net/essays/reply-to.html and
http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html and think
about it.

[...] 
> > That's probably true, but if list lurkers choose to use broken
> >autoresponders that may reveal their address to a list poster and are

If I really want only to lurk, I wouldn't use an autoresponder at
all ...

> >upset about that, that's really their problem. What do they do about
> >all the spam they autorespond to? Do they care about that?
> 
> I don't think most people know that autoresponders can be broken. I didn't

Unfortunately many people at MSFT also do not know it - the one from
MS-Outlook, MS-OE or Exchange - or wherever that is from - is seriously
broken (as in replying to "Precedence: List" Mails and especially
replying to the very same address each time, possibly multiple times a
day. For me, that is just another class of spam. Greetings to my
Bayes-DB ....).

> until I started running the list and began reading majordomo and mailman
> users group. And it probably doesn't cross their minds that the
> autoresponder is replying to spam. Maybe because work email systems seem to
> trawl out so much spam. In any case, there's nothing they can do about that

They probably do not get much spam - especially if they primarily lurk
on the public internet and have somewhat sane spam-filters (read: sane
postmasters) at work.

> apart from telling their IT dept when becoming aware of it. At work, you
> have to have an out of office message when you're away.
> 
> I will suggest this person tells her IT dept.

Good luck. The standard answer is that it can't be changed within the
classical MSFT mail infrastructure (except not using the autoresponder.
Actually I do not know why it is important to people to let everyone
know, that you are 2 days out of office. If it's not that urgent, it can
wait anyways. If it is that urgent, I should - or more must - have done
something before to handle these urgent cases.).

[ Full quote deleted. ]

Bernd
-- 
Bernd Petrovitsch                  Email : bernd at petrovitsch.priv.at
                     LUGA : http://www.luga.at