Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Eric Rosen]

> This is arguably another problem with such messages - they should probably 
> go to the envelope return address (from the SMTP MAIL FROM command or the
> return-path header field) rather than to the author's address (from the
> From header field). 


That will get them sent to  the mailing list manager, who certainly will not
care to learn which of the thousands of mailing list members are on vacation
at any given time. 

Of  course, the  mailing list  manager  also does  not care  to learn  which
mailing list members  have exhausted their disk quotas  either, but hundreds
of mailservers are  very happy to tell him to please  send the message again
later.

RFC 1211  should be  required reading for  anyone developing a  mail server.
Perhaps then the developers would  at least take mailing lists into account;
it's pretty clear that most of  these systems are designed on the assumption
that mail is one-to-one.

With regard  to the  reply from  Microsoft, note that  the issue  of sending
vacation messages to  the Internet is completely orthogonal  to the issue of
sending vacation messages in response to a message from a mailing list.