> From: Dave Crocker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> ...
> The rule "if the recipient is not cited in the
> message header To or CC (and if there is no BCC)
> then do not sent an automatic response" embodies
> the distinction between personal mail and bulk mail.
>
> It is a heuristic, but a good one. ...
Yes, and writing (reasonable) code is mostly a matter of obtaining
(mostly from other people) and codify good heuristics.
> And that said, it's clear we need a standard covering automated responses.
>
> THEN it will quite clearly NOT be a matter of configuration...
Besides the manual page for the open source, decades old `vacation,` which
probably was the inspiration for the "Internet Mail Service" out-of-office
notifications, there is page 7 of RFC 1894:
The DSN MUST be addressed (in both the message header and the
transport envelope) to the return address from the transport envelope
which accompanied the original message for which the DSN was
generated. (For a message that arrived via SMTP, the envelope return
address appears in the MAIL FROM command.)
It wouldn't hurt to have a dummy's guide for writing vacation programs
that spells out the obvious, such as the fact that an out-of-office
notification is an unsolicted, ad hoc DSN. However, it wouldn't do
much good in a larger sense. If writing down standards or good, common
sense heuristics made much difference, then there are many problems
could not exist, including not only this "Internet Mail Service OOF"
problem but also a bunch of embrace-and-extend problems in PPP that
happened after lots of writing in the IETF.
Vernon Schryver [EMAIL PROTECTED]
