Why do so many supposedly clueful people have their vacation message system respond to mailing list email?
Now I'll get to see who also doesn't keep a list of addresses that have already been sent the out of office message 
Mark.
Because it's *impossible* to get one of the most popular MUAs to understand
that mail with an SMTP MAIL FROM 'owner-*@*' shouldn't be replied to.
So it's just a special case of "why do clueful people use software from that
vendor"?. And since it's the holidays, let's just leave it at that.
Mark Prior wrote:
Why do so many supposedly clueful people have their vacation message
system respond to mailing list email?Now I'll get to see who also doesn't keep a list of addresses that have
already been sent the out of office message
Among the ones I found when I looked into the question with some
rigor a few years ago were that mailing list traffic often no longer
has a useful "precedence" value that was used to screen such mail.
Another is the modern MUA and MUA-like programs don't know how to
use any of the intelligence available to make the determination, or
the interest in making it if the intelligence is there.
One of the fun things is dealing with an MTA pair that don't think
"time-to-live" applies to their important stuff that serve an MUA-like
device that is certain that every one will want to know the finest
details if their important master's travels, no matter what.
In short--I don't think the protocol supports the notion of
"vacation auto responders" any more, and the mineset of the modern
customer is that their stuff is so important that surely everyone
will need to know all there is to know.
nanog has a clear Precedence: bulk line in the header which is
the defacto standard for handling this, so that can't be it.
i think it's basically clueless IT staffs trying to reinvent a wheel
that's been invented, usually badly, billions and billions of times
over the past 30 or so years.
richard
I don't think it's even that clever - I think it's just Out of Office
assistant in Exchange / Outlook, which replies blindly to every email it sees,
whether it's directly addressed to the recipient or not, whether it has
Precedence: set or not...
There are several other tests to perform (if you are a reasonable program, that is), before sending an "Out of the office" message. An obvious one is to see wether your human owner is mentioned in the To: field. Unless the list explodes the messages in one explicit copy per recipient, this is enough.
Of course, that doesn't work with a list that doesn't set reply-to the list.
A lot of followups on nanog are reply-all, cc'd to the OP and anybody else who
posted to a thread.
  srs
There are several other tests to perform (if you are a reasonable
program, that is), before sending an "Out of the office" message. An
obvious one is to see wether your human owner is mentioned in the To:
field. Unless the list explodes the messages in one explicit copy per
recipient, this is enough.
* suresh@outblaze.com (Suresh Ramasubramanian) [Fri 26 Dec 2003, 02:01 CET]:
Of course, that doesn't work with a list that doesn't set reply-to the list.
A lot of followups on nanog are reply-all, cc'd to the OP and anybody
else who posted to a thread.
Why would you enable O-o-O autoreplies if you're actively participating
in a thread on a mailing list?
(Stepping over the obvious question - why would you enable them in the
first place, knowing that it annoys the hell out of a lot of people)
-- Niels.
Niels Bakker writes on 12/25/2003 9:02 PM:
Why would you enable O-o-O autoreplies if you're actively participating
in a thread on a mailing list?(Stepping over the obvious question - why would you enable them in the
first place, knowing that it annoys the hell out of a lot of people)
I wouldn't. But if I was using exchange and the exchange admin had enabled 'em ... the only two things to do are -
* Setting up the list subscription to go to a pubic folder
* A registry setting in Exchange 2003
srs
> Why do so many supposedly clueful people have their vacation message
> system respond to mailing list email?Among the ones I found when I looked into the question with some
rigor a few years ago were that mailing list traffic often no longer
has a useful "precedence" value that was used to screen such mail.
Surely regardless of the presence of precedence you would never autoreply to an
email that wasnt addressed to you personally?
Steve
Why? There is Mail-Followup-To and you can set Reply-To yourself. And you can
always edit your headers (or have a software which can do it automatically
like mutt).
And the purpose was not to suppress *every* O-o-O message (they are very
useful), just to lower the number and increase the average relevance.
Stephane Bortzmeyer writes on 12/26/2003 9:07 AM:
Why? There is Mail-Followup-To and you can set Reply-To yourself. And you can always edit your headers (or have a software which can do it automatically like mutt).
Look - just how many mail clients (other than mutt / gnus) honor the M-F-T header? And I am not trying to rehash the "reply-to the list is good / bad" thread, I don't really feel all that strongly about it.
What I said is that the method proposed wouldn't cut down on OOOs to the list.
srs
And I add: in the To: field, not the CC: one.
What I said is that the method proposed wouldn't cut down on OOOs to the
list.
Yes, it will, in most cases. Let's take the following message:
Stephane Bortzmeyer writes on 12/26/2003 9:30 AM:
Again, if your auto-responder writes to *anyone*, it is broken, period.
Then again, most of the autoresponders being sent to the list are from Exchange. Which is broken, period.
"Stephen J. Wilcox" wrote:
> > Why do so many supposedly clueful people have their vacation message
> > system respond to mailing list email?
>
> Among the ones I found when I looked into the question with some
> rigor a few years ago were that mailing list traffic often no longer
> has a useful "precedence" value that was used to screen such mail.Surely regardless of the presence of precedence you would never autoreply to an
email that wasnt addressed to you personally?
I would not, not would an autoresponder that I would use.
But this was addressed to me, cc NANOG, with no precedence indicated.
My point, pretty much exactly.