Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:I would have to disagree. A vacation response, a message that says "Your message can not be read right now because no-one is here to read it" is, IMHO, a delivery status notification. As such it should be sent to the SMTP reverse path, not to the address in the From: header. Since the reverse path of list messages is almost invariably an address associated with the list in some way, not the address of the original poster, the auto-responder was broken.Consider how it scales. Assume that at any given time, maybe 5% of your list are "on vacation". If they all used broken autoresponders, then a single post to a list of 1000 would generate 50 autoresponses to the sender. Subsequent posts from the same user would generate fewer, but still your policy does not scale well unless only a small minority of users use broken autoresponders.
That assumes the auto-responder is broken...from what the original poster has said, this one is not broken, since it has sent just one response to each person that sent it mail.
When you post to a large list you do not expect to receive DSNs for those addresses that are now dead but have yet to be removed from the list. Why is it OK to receive a vacation message?
Letting people know you can't answer their email right away is a polite, thoughtful thing to do...
In many cases, I'd have to disagree again. If, as a customer, I mail an employee of a company about a particular issue is it really good customer care if I receive a message saying "I'll get around to looking at your mail in a month or so; right now I'm working on my tan in Barbados". From my point of view I don't care about his/her holiday, I care about getting a prompt response to my enquiry. What would be far better customer care would be if my mail was forwarded to the colleague covering, read, dealt with and replied to.
-- Chris Hastie
