On 9/11/20 2:07 PM, Kieran Cooper via mailop wrote: > Does anyone have any knowledge of how Gmail decides when to send an > auto-reply?
---- RFC 3834 : 2. When (not) to send automatic responses An automatic responder MUST NOT blindly send a response for every message received. In practice there are always reasons to refuse to respond to some kinds of received messages, e.g., for loop prevention, to avoid responding to "spam" or viruses, to avoid being used as a means to launder or amplify abusive messages, to avoid inappropriately revealing personal information about the recipient (e.g., to avoid an automatic indication that a recipient has not read his mail recently), and to thwart denial-of-service attacks against the responder. The criteria for deciding whether to respond will differ from one responder to another, according to the responder's purpose. In general, care should be taken to avoid sending useless or redundant responses, and to avoid contributing to mail loops or facilitating denial-of-service attacks. ---- Your question is more tricky than what you thought... > It also looks as though Gmail sends these auto-replies to the return path > address instead of either the From or Reply-To, which doesn’t seem to me like > the right thing to do…. Same RFC : ---- 4. Where to send automatic responses (and where not to send them) In general, automatic responses SHOULD be sent to the Return-Path field if generated after delivery. If the response is generated prior to delivery, the response SHOULD be sent to the reverse-path from the SMTP MAIL FROM command, or (in a non-SMTP system) to the envelope return address which serves as the destination for non- delivery reports. ---- François _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://chilli.nosignal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mailop
