Just a clarification post:
At 10:14 AM 5/04/01 -0400, James M Galvin wrote:
>RFC2298 defines Message Delivery Notifications, the intended use of
>which is to report to a sender conditions that occur after a message is
>delivered. It states that such reports go to the Envelope From, or
>Return Path, which means that list failed mail processors must be
>prepared to deal with such things. Thus, you are correct and the system
>used by Sharon is not behaving in a way consistent with the Standard.
<SNIP>
>My preference has always been that vacation notices and autoresponders
>are not subject to RFC2298, which would mean that Sharon system's is
>just fine. What I would like to see is a Standard that says vacation
>notices and autoreponders reply to the message REPLY-TO or FROM header
>but (and this is a very BIG BUT) only if the recipient is actually
>listed in the message TO or CC header.
Jim, we're saying the same thing except for the TO or CC bit.
What we are doing is consistent with the standard if it is
interpreted to include autoresponder messages. But what I said
is that it is more logical for it to go to the reply-to or
from addresss to avoid a lot of admin headaches.
One thing I'm seeing a lot of these days are autoresponder
messages kicked back with a different from address than what
was mailed to and the original email included in the reply-to.
Any info allowing the system to recognize this as an
autoresponder is stripped. So what happens in
these cases is that a loop can occur - i.e. the list server
thinks that someone is trying to send email with invalid
commands to the server, so it kicks back an error message
which in turn can result in more autoresponder messages
being generated.
I'd LOVE to see mail admins realize that vacation messages
should only go out once to an address and not every time
it receives an email.
