Just pointing out that the subscriber who makes use of a tool is not necessarily the one who should be thought badly of (i.e. rather than the tool's author).
It's not necessarily the author either. It could be the short-sighted admin who installed it, assuming that all mail to company addresses is personally directed to all addressees and that every message to an employee on vacation must get a vacation response every time, misconfigured the autoresponding software accordingly even though the author's defaults were sensible, and then got some gullible executive to order all employees to activate it when they are out of the office.
Then not only do the employees have no options; they don't know that the software has maleficent shortcomings.
That's why I said that JC or any other list administrator should go gently on a first-time offender. The autoresponding subscriber may have had no choice. If it recurs during another absence, then either the subscriber didn't or couldn't do anything about it. In the case of "didn't," ban the jerk; in the case of "couldn't," ban the domain and notify all subscribers at addresses in it that they're welcome to rejoin from different accounts.
In my list administering days I ran into both situations.
