> It would be really nice if:
>
> - folks who really feel it necessary could configure their "out of the
> office" messages to not respond to mailing lists or
> - unsubscribe to the list while they're out or
> - leave the message on their voicemail (instead of email)
Thanks Dale, I apologize for having let this go for so long. I will include
a warning in the signup message. I do inform people whenever I encounter
this (and unsubscribe them), but apparently that hasn't helped much.
Still, I think education is the best approach right now.
Everybody:
- IF YOU ARE USING A 'VACATION' PROGRAM, PLEASE MAKE SURE IT IGNORES
MESSAGES FROM ANY MAILING LISTS YOU'RE ON
- IF YOU RECEIVE AN 'Out of office' MESSAGE AFTER POSTING TO THIS
LIST, PLEASE LET ME KNOW at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Some lists will just automatically unsub based on these messages (or
> suppress them). Does db2eug have this capability, Scott? Sure would be
> nice not to have to clean these out of the archives.
No, it doesn't, I do this manually (the alternative right now would be to
manually approve _all_ messages).
Anyway, this is only part of the problem; the vacation programs that reply
to the list are actually configured better than the ones that reply to the
sender of the message (but that's another story altogether) - and this
happens a lot more often, which I obviously only catch whenever I post
myself, which doesn't happen much these days.
The core of the problem however, lies within software like MS Exchange
(which not coincidentally was what the member that caused today's problem
is using), that doesn't understand the distinction between envelope and
header. These kind of replies should go to the envelope From: (which would
have disappeared into the bit bucket) and not the header From: or Reply-To:.
OK, to the point. I could alleviate your 'cleaning duties' by fixing a
misconfiguration on my part: I set the Reply-To: field to the list, which
I found out later is a Bad Thing (TM). This, however, would require
people to reply to the list by choosing 'reply to all', 'group reply', or
whatever it's called in their specific mail agent. I thought this would
be a major thing to get used to, and was putting it off until we're
moving the mailing list to another server. Also, it wouldn't really solve
the problem, but just move it; replies would then probably go to the
sender of the message again, which is still wrong (see above).
So for now, I'm leaning towards sticking with education, but I welcome
any feedback, to the list if interesting to others, or by private email.
Arnoud Morsink
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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