Chris Hastie added, |6) Do not respond to messages that do not explicitly contain your | address in the To: or Cc: headers.
I've said this once already, but it's been a few days and people such as Chris seem to be trickling in and just now catching up with the thread: if you're carboned on a message, then you're a bystander, and your perusal is neither urgent nor critical. In my opinion, don't send a vacation response if your address is in Cc:, only if it's in To:. |7) If you really must respond, do so to the SMTP reverse-path, not | the From: or Reply-to: header address. There I disagree strongly. An OoO is not a DSN. A message that gets a vacation response was delivered successfully, so no DSN is called for. The subsequent journey from the recipient's mailspool to the recipient's eyes is a separate matter. I'd say that on the occasions when an OoO is justified in the first place, it should be sent to the address where a reply would go, because that's where anyone who cares about the message's being read would be looking for mail from the recipient. Like a reply, the content of an OoO is about the human factors, not about the computers. In my view it is a penepessimum argument. I can think of no circumstances where a vacation response to From: or Reply-To: is bad yet one to the return-path is good, just cases where using the return-path would be the least evil of three bad ideas (as in Chris's example of a mailing list) but sending none at all is even better.
