On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Matthew W. Ross
<mr...@ephrataschools.org> wrote:
> My understanding is that because of the "Reply To" field being set to the
> list, when I hit Reply to your email, it is automatically sent to the list.
> (This
> behavior is what I have observed with every email client I have used,
> including
> Outlook.)
The "Reply-To" header is intended to signify the address which
replies should be sent to, yes. It is generally honored by mail
software. But ultimately, software does whatever it's programmed to
do.
> You're saying that Exchange, before it even gets to a client (such as Outlook)
> is doing the auto response and ignoring the "Reply To" Field.
Exactly. The out-of-office auto-response is implemented in Exchange
server, not the Outlook client. Otherwise, you'd need to leave
Outlook open and running during your vacation.
And again, an automatically generated message should not look at the
RFC-822 headers at all; it should use the SMTP envelope reverse-path
("MAIL FROM:" address). So, really, Exchange is broken twice here:
Once for using the RFC-822 headers for an auto-response, and again for
then ignoring Reply-To in the RFC-822 headers.
> Then there should be some way to determine that the traffic came from a list,
> and an auto-response is unnecessary.
That should be possible, too. There are various headers defined for
mailing list use, in standards-track RFCs. Even Friggin' Lyris uses
them. If these headers are present, the message is list traffic.
It's perhaps reasonable to suppose auto-responses should not be sent
in response to list mail.
-- Ben
~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
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