Auto-Acks (was: too many "Out of Office AutoReply")

[Aronson, David]

Lloyd Wood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] writes (to the ietf list plus a bunch
of individuals I have removed; Lloyd, if you think they'd be interested,
feel free to respond):

 > I think [Disposition-Notification-To:] can be an invasion
 > of privacy, since a mail agent responding to it is telling you when
 > the mail is read.

And what a golden tool for spammers.  No longer need they trick newbies into
asking to be removed, to verify that the address is valid

-- 
Dave Aronson, Sysop of free public Fidonet BBS Air 'n Sun, +1-703-319-0714.
Opinions all MINE, not by Cryptek/NRA/SCA/Mensa/HWG/LPUSA/CAUCE/FedGov/God!
See my web site, at http://listen.to/davearonson (last updated 2001-06-27).
Device-driver proggers: see http://www.cryptek.com and send me your resume!

RE: Re[2]: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Bob Braden]

  *> 
  *> On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Ashutosh Agarwal wrote:
  *> 
  *> > I personally would like to receive some kind of ACK from the person whom I
  *> > am trying to send a mailso that I am rest assured that the mail has
  *> > reached him
  *> 
  *> Disposition-Notification-To: does that. I think it can be an invasion
  *> of privacy, since a mail agent responding to it is telling you when
  *> the mail is read.
  *> 
  *> An ack that the mail is received != an ack that a mail has reached the
  *> person and been read, of course.

This is a 25 year old issue.  The consensus is that there is no
protocol mechanism that can EVER tell whether your message has
penetrated the brain of the recipient, except by an explicit ACK
message that the recipient initiated.  Which has worked well enough for
25 years, and probably will work for another 25.
  *>
  *> > SO LETS STOP THIS DISCUSSION RIGHT HERE...AND USE THE IETF FOR SOMETHING
  *> > BETTER
  *> 

Yes!

Bob Braden

PS Trimming irrelevant addresses from headers is also a 25 year old
courtesy.


  *> The IETF is for discussing problems.
  *> Occasionally, this has been known to lead to resolving problems.
  *> 
  *> L.
  *> 
  *> but not recently, eh?
  *> 
  *> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>PGP
  *> 

Re: Re[2]: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001 23:05:18 +0530, Ashutosh Agarwal said:
> I personally would like to receive some kind of ACK from the person whom I
> am trying to send a mailso that I am rest assured that the mail has

Some of us do *NOT* like getting 15 or 20 such messages from people we have
never heard of, just because we post to the IETF or Bugtraq or Incidents
mailing lists.  How many responses did you get to *your* posting?  The IETF
list is relatively "clean" this week - but I *have* had days when I have
gotten over *200* of these "Out of Clue AutoReply" in *ONE DAY*.

And not one single solitary one was a result of a direct mail to that
recipient - all 200 were nice replies to things I posted to the list.
Over and over and over.  I post 4 times in one day, these things are
nice enough to tell me 4 times that day that yes, George is STILL out
of the office and will be for the next week.  Never mind that it:

1) it SHOULD keep track of who it replied to and not reply AGAIN for
this invocation of "out of office".

2) it SHOULD NOT reply to mailing list postings.

There *is* RFC2298 on how to get an ACK from the mail system.
And guess what - it specifically says to not auto-reply if the origin seems
to be a mailing list.  From section 2.1:

   MDNs SHOULD NOT be sent automatically if the address in the
   Disposition-Notification-To header differs from the address in the
   Return-Path header (see RFC 822 [2]).  In this case, confirmation
   from the user SHOULD be obtained, if possible.  If obtaining consent
   is not possible (e.g., because the user is not online at the time),
   then an MDN SHOULD NOT be sent.

/Valdis

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Paul Hoffman / IMC]

At 1:23 PM -0400 6/29/01, John C Klensin wrote:
>Paul, while I generally agree with your description of the
>problem, we _do_ have a standard in this case.   RFC 2919
>specifies some list-specific special headers.

Correct. That standard was issued after all of the SMTP servers in 
question were released. (For those of you who don't want to look in 
the RFC archive, that RFC was issued in March 2001.)

>   From episodic
>examinations of messages arriving here from various lists, it
>has gotten reasonably well implemented, almost certainly enough
>so to  promote it to Draft Standard if someone does the work in
>the next few months.

But, of course, that won't help in the current case, because this 
list doesn't use the standard.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Keith Moore]

> >But I'm disturbed that Exchange is using the Precedence: line as its
> >selector mechanism.  I'm hardly an email expert, but a quick grep
> >through the RFCs turned up exactly one mention of the Precedence:
> >header line.  That reference is in 2076, which describes it as
> >"Non-standard, controversial, discouraged".  No RFC definition is cited.
> >It would be nice if such an important feature relied only on
> >standardized headers.
> 
> In this case, there are
> non-standard headers in common use that give valuable heuristics to
> programs, and no standard ones that give the same information. Many
> companies, apparently including Microsoft, use that non-standard
> information.

Extension header fields are explicitly permitted by the standards, and
(for better or worse) other vacation programs also recognize the 
Precedence field.  So it's unfair to single out Microsoft for 
using it also.  But although the heuristic is widely used, it 
has never been considered sufficient.

Keith

p.s. there are a lot of problems with Precedence, not the least of
which are that it is used for at least 5 different things by different
mail packages: for influencing queueing priority, deciding whether 
to return content in nondelivery reports, deciding whether to return
a vacation message, indication of message importance, and as a loop 
prevention sentinel by mailing list software.  There are probably others.
Most of these uses do not conflict with one another, but occasionally 
they do.  It's not exactly a robust mechanism.

RE: Re[2]: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Ashutosh Agarwal]

I have noticed that for the past few days , the IETF has been flooded with
these  so called "OUT OF OFFICE AUTOREPLY"..debate.
But don't you ppl in IETF think that these mails are a way to intimidate the
sender that the person to whom you are sending the mail is out of office or
something..why do we make every small thing such a big issue?
can we not use this medium(IETF) for someting better?

I personally would like to receive some kind of ACK from the person whom I
am trying to send a mailso that I am rest assured that the mail has
reached himI agree that in case a mail does not reach the concerned ID
we do get a mailer-deamon normally...yet i prefer this interaction/

SO LETS STOP THIS DISCUSSION RIGHT HERE...AND USE THE IETF FOR SOMETHING
BETTER



Ashutosh Agarwal
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
I trust I make myself obscure



> --
> From: Theodore Tso[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 06:20 PM
> To:   Gene Gaines
> Cc:   David Lemson; Keith Moore; ietf
> Subject:  Re: Re[2]: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"
> 
> On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 04:08:20AM -0400, Gene Gaines wrote:
> > Why in god's name would any email program worth 2 cents
> > not have this feature?
> 
> That's easy; for a long time (although this seems to be less true
> today), Microsoft apparently had a strong bias of trying very hard to
> hire the best and the brightest --- of people fresh out of college.
> Heaven forfend that they actually hire people with industry
> experience.
> 
> As a result, a lot of things which most people would consider common
> sense and common practice don't actually happen until after the first
> couple of versions of the program are released and people scream
> bloody murder.  (After all, good vacation hueristics have been around
> for well over a decade.)  
> 
> However, when MS Exchange finally has this feature, no doubt their
> marketing folks will trumpet how they "invented" it.  After all, this
> is the sort of thing which is why they claim they need the "freedom to
> innovate".
> 
>   - Ted
> 

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[John C Klensin]

--On Friday, 29 June, 2001 09:02 -0700 "Paul Hoffman / IMC"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Steve, we'll forgive you for not being an email expert. If you
> were  one, you would know that this topic, and half a dozen of
> related  meta-topics, have been beaten to death in the
> (finally dead!) DRUMS  WG, and on the ietf-822 mailing list in
> the past six or seven years.  A summary is that some
> implementations prefer to be strictly  standards-compliant but
> piss off their users by not doing enough,  while others choose
> to do things the users want even though it  doesn't go
> strictly by the standards. In this case, there are 
> non-standard headers in common use that give valuable
> heuristics to  programs, and no standard ones that give the
> same information. Many  companies, apparently including
> Microsoft, use that non-standard  information.

Paul, while I generally agree with your description of the
problem, we _do_ have a standard in this case.   RFC 2919
specifies some list-specific special headers.  From episodic
examinations of messages arriving here from various lists, it
has gotten reasonably well implemented, almost certainly enough
so to  promote it to Draft Standard if someone does the work in
the next few months.   And nothing prevents a receiving MTA from
observing the presence of those fields and using that
information to suppress vacation/ out-of-office messages even
if, for historical reasons, they also consider Precedence fields
(or whatever).

   john

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Einar Stefferud]

This solves the wrong problem.

The problem is that the autoreply out of office thingy responds 
directly to the submitter of the listserved message, not to the 
listserver, so there is no filterable contact between the autoreply 
and the list server.

Cheers...\Stef


At 14:40 +0100 29/06/01, CARDOSO Jorge Miguel wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I think this topic started somewhere because of my "Out of Office AutoReply"
>emails.
>Sorry for the incovenience, Im working out of Portugal in London, but i
>deactivated this function remotely.
>Concerning this matter, its a mickeysoft tool - Yes - confirmed. I have
>always a lot of people trying to contact me concerning Urgent issues and its
>necessary to give them an easy path to reach me - this tool of autoreply is
>usefull.
>
>I can sugest something logic:
>
>- since the tool for filtering "Out of Office AutoReply" on the origin will
>not be developed in short time, and there will be for sure another users
>using "Out of Office AutoReply", the smart mailing-list mail-server should
>apply a rule filtered by subject because the subject field seems to be
>always the same "Out of Office AutoReply:".
>
>so,
>the rule would be: if subject field starts with string "Out of Office
>AutoReply:", the mail is dropped else proceed.
>
>
>regards,
>j0rge card0s0

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Paul Hoffman / IMC]

At 9:30 AM -0400 6/29/01, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>But I'm disturbed that Exchange is using the Precedence: line as its
>selector mechanism.  I'm hardly an email expert, but a quick grep
>through the RFCs turned up exactly one mention of the Precedence:
>header line.  That reference is in 2076, which describes it as
>"Non-standard, controversial, discouraged".  No RFC definition is cited.
>It would be nice if such an important feature relied only on
>standardized headers.

Steve, we'll forgive you for not being an email expert. If you were 
one, you would know that this topic, and half a dozen of related 
meta-topics, have been beaten to death in the (finally dead!) DRUMS 
WG, and on the ietf-822 mailing list in the past six or seven years. 
A summary is that some implementations prefer to be strictly 
standards-compliant but piss off their users by not doing enough, 
while others choose to do things the users want even though it 
doesn't go strictly by the standards. In this case, there are 
non-standard headers in common use that give valuable heuristics to 
programs, and no standard ones that give the same information. Many 
companies, apparently including Microsoft, use that non-standard 
information.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Keith Moore]

> > This is arguably another problem with such messages - they should probably
> > go to the envelope return address (from the SMTP MAIL FROM command or the
> > return-path header field) rather than to the author's address (from the
> > From header field).
> 
> 
> That will get them sent to  the mailing list manager, who certainly will not
> care to learn which of the thousands of mailing list members are on vacation
> at any given time.

Actually, these days it's increasingly likely to get sent to a "bounced 
message parser" that tries to parse bounced messages and discover which
recipients' addresses are consistently failing.  That parser can also be
taught to ignore "out of office autoreplies".
 
> Of  course, the  mailing list  manager  also does  not care  to learn  which
> mailing list members  have exhausted their disk quotas  either, but hundreds
> of mailservers are  very happy to tell him to please  send the message again
> later.

When the reporting MTAs use DSN format (and report the proper status codes
for this condition) the bounced mail parser can treat disk quota failures 
differently from "no such user" and other more permanent conditions, and 
avoid removing list recipients for temporary disk quota failures.

Keith

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Eric Rosen]

> This is arguably another problem with such messages - they should probably 
> go to the envelope return address (from the SMTP MAIL FROM command or the
> return-path header field) rather than to the author's address (from the
> From header field). 


That will get them sent to  the mailing list manager, who certainly will not
care to learn which of the thousands of mailing list members are on vacation
at any given time. 

Of  course, the  mailing list  manager  also does  not care  to learn  which
mailing list members  have exhausted their disk quotas  either, but hundreds
of mailservers are  very happy to tell him to please  send the message again
later.

RFC 1211  should be  required reading for  anyone developing a  mail server.
Perhaps then the developers would  at least take mailing lists into account;
it's pretty clear that most of  these systems are designed on the assumption
that mail is one-to-one.

With regard  to the  reply from  Microsoft, note that  the issue  of sending
vacation messages to  the Internet is completely orthogonal  to the issue of
sending vacation messages in response to a message from a mailing list.  

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Steven M. Bellovin]

Thanks for the note -- I'll resist the temptation to have procmail 
forward a copy of your instructions to anyone whose mailer sends such
a note to the IETF list.

But I'm disturbed that Exchange is using the Precedence: line as its 
selector mechanism.  I'm hardly an email expert, but a quick grep 
through the RFCs turned up exactly one mention of the Precedence: 
header line.  That reference is in 2076, which describes it as 
"Non-standard, controversial, discouraged".  No RFC definition is cited.
It would be nice if such an important feature relied only on 
standardized headers.


--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Keith Moore]

> - since the tool for filtering "Out of Office AutoReply" on the origin will
> not be developed in short time, and there will be for sure another users
> using "Out of Office AutoReply", the smart mailing-list mail-server should
> apply a rule filtered by subject because the subject field seems to be
> always the same "Out of Office AutoReply:".

this doesn't work, because the "out of office autoreply" messages are
not sent via the list server - they are sent directly to the author of 
the subject message. 

This is arguably another problem with such messages - they should probably 
go to the envelope return address (from the SMTP MAIL FROM command or the
return-path header field) rather than to the author's address (from the
>From header field).

Keith

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[A James Lewis]

If one were to do that then the problem would not be fixed in the long
term either... but thanks for the comment.

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, CARDOSO Jorge Miguel wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I think this topic started somewhere because of my "Out of Office AutoReply"
> emails.
> Sorry for the incovenience, Im working out of Portugal in London, but i
> deactivated this function remotely.
> Concerning this matter, its a mickeysoft tool - Yes - confirmed. I have
> always a lot of people trying to contact me concerning Urgent issues and its
> necessary to give them an easy path to reach me - this tool of autoreply is
> usefull.
>
> I can sugest something logic:
>
> - since the tool for filtering "Out of Office AutoReply" on the origin will
> not be developed in short time, and there will be for sure another users
> using "Out of Office AutoReply", the smart mailing-list mail-server should
> apply a rule filtered by subject because the subject field seems to be
> always the same "Out of Office AutoReply:".
>
> so,
> the rule would be: if subject field starts with string "Out of Office
> AutoReply:", the mail is dropped else proceed.
>
>
> regards,
> j0rge card0s0
>

A. James Lewis ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Open Source Specialists  http://www.entora.co.uk/
Tel: +44 (0)701 0723686  Fax: +44 (0)870 3214368

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Gene Gaines]

j0rge,

But, that might filter some "Out of Office AutoReply" messages
that are intended for me.

A more general solution would be to look for header fields beginning
"X-" which contains certain words.  "Microsoft" would good.

Gene
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

On Friday, June 29, 2001, 9:40:03 AM, CARDOSO wrote:

> Hi,

> I think this topic started somewhere because of my "Out of Office AutoReply"
> emails.
> Sorry for the incovenience, Im working out of Portugal in London, but i
> deactivated this function remotely.
> Concerning this matter, its a mickeysoft tool - Yes - confirmed. I have
> always a lot of people trying to contact me concerning Urgent issues and its
> necessary to give them an easy path to reach me - this tool of autoreply is
> usefull.

> I can sugest something logic: 

> - since the tool for filtering "Out of Office AutoReply" on the origin will
> not be developed in short time, and there will be for sure another users
> using "Out of Office AutoReply", the smart mailing-list mail-server should
> apply a rule filtered by subject because the subject field seems to be
> always the same "Out of Office AutoReply:".

> so,
> the rule would be: if subject field starts with string "Out of Office
> AutoReply:", the mail is dropped else proceed.


> regards,
> j0rge card0s0


-- 

too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[CARDOSO Jorge Miguel]

Hi,

I think this topic started somewhere because of my "Out of Office AutoReply"
emails.
Sorry for the incovenience, Im working out of Portugal in London, but i
deactivated this function remotely.
Concerning this matter, its a mickeysoft tool - Yes - confirmed. I have
always a lot of people trying to contact me concerning Urgent issues and its
necessary to give them an easy path to reach me - this tool of autoreply is
usefull.

I can sugest something logic: 

- since the tool for filtering "Out of Office AutoReply" on the origin will
not be developed in short time, and there will be for sure another users
using "Out of Office AutoReply", the smart mailing-list mail-server should
apply a rule filtered by subject because the subject field seems to be
always the same "Out of Office AutoReply:".

so,
the rule would be: if subject field starts with string "Out of Office
AutoReply:", the mail is dropped else proceed.


regards,
j0rge card0s0

Re: Re[2]: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Theodore Tso]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 04:08:20AM -0400, Gene Gaines wrote:
> Why in god's name would any email program worth 2 cents
> not have this feature?

That's easy; for a long time (although this seems to be less true
today), Microsoft apparently had a strong bias of trying very hard to
hire the best and the brightest --- of people fresh out of college.
Heaven forfend that they actually hire people with industry
experience.

As a result, a lot of things which most people would consider common
sense and common practice don't actually happen until after the first
couple of versions of the program are released and people scream
bloody murder.  (After all, good vacation hueristics have been around
for well over a decade.)  

However, when MS Exchange finally has this feature, no doubt their
marketing folks will trumpet how they "invented" it.  After all, this
is the sort of thing which is why they claim they need the "freedom to
innovate".

- Ted

Re[2]: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Gene Gaines]

David,

Why in god's name would any email program worth 2 cents
not have this feature?

Gene
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

On Thursday, June 28, 2001, 10:32:16 PM, David wrote:

>> David,
>> 
>> Thanks for the step-by-step instructions.  I'm curious, 
>> though - the usual heuristic for most "vacation 
>> auto-responders" has been to 
>> not send responses to any message which didn't include the 
>> recipient's address in the to or cc header field.  Is there a way 
>> to configure Exchange to use that heuristic?
>> 
>> Keith

> At this time, there is no way to configure Exchange to do that.  Most of
> our customer feedback has been that our current configuration scheme,
> which allows per-domain configuration, meets our customers' needs.  

> Based on recent customer input (including this thread's input), we are
> currently evaluating adding that feature.  I can't promise when it will
> make it into the product, but I do agree that it is a good thing to do.


> David

> ---
> David Lemson
> Lead Program Manager
> Exchange Server
> Microsoft Corporation
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]


-- 

RE: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Mak, L (Leen)]

David wrote:

> The main reason is
> for security - you wouldn't necessarily want your competitors 
> to be able
> to mail your people and find out you all went to Vegas for 
> the weekend.
> 


Exactly for this reason I never use the out-of-the office feature.
I consider it the electronic equivalent of putting the proverbial note 
on the frontdoor of my house stating "no milk this and next week" 
(which means "dear would-be burglar, come back one of these
nights, no-one will kick you out")

Leen.

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Keith Moore]

> At this time, there is no way to configure Exchange to do that.  Most of
> our customer feedback has been that our current configuration scheme,
> which allows per-domain configuration, meets our customers' needs.

that's unfortunate.  of course your customers are not the ones being harmed
(at least, not directly) when their mailers inappropriately reply to 
messages from mailing lists. 

the per-domain configuration serves a different purpose - that of not 
disclosing your customers' absences to outsiders.  that's a useful and 
valuable feature for those who want to enable it. it just doesn't happen 
to fix this particular problem. 

Keith

RE: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[David Lemson]

> David,
> 
> Thanks for the step-by-step instructions.  I'm curious, 
> though - the usual heuristic for most "vacation 
> auto-responders" has been to 
> not send responses to any message which didn't include the 
> recipient's address in the to or cc header field.  Is there a way 
> to configure Exchange to use that heuristic?
> 
> Keith

At this time, there is no way to configure Exchange to do that.  Most of
our customer feedback has been that our current configuration scheme,
which allows per-domain configuration, meets our customers' needs.  

Based on recent customer input (including this thread's input), we are
currently evaluating adding that feature.  I can't promise when it will
make it into the product, but I do agree that it is a good thing to do.


David

---
David Lemson
Lead Program Manager
Exchange Server
Microsoft Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Keith Moore]

David,

Thanks for the step-by-step instructions.  I'm curious, though -
the usual heuristic for most "vacation auto-responders" has been to 
not send responses to any message which didn't include the 
recipient's address in the to or cc header field.  Is there a way 
to configure Exchange to use that heuristic?

Keith

RE: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[David Lemson]

> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 9:25 AM
> To: Lloyd Wood
> Cc: A James Lewis; ietf
> Subject: Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"
> 
> 
> On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:25:07 BST, Lloyd Wood said:
> 
> > message. Apparently the Microsoft stuff is quite hard to configure 
> > well.
> 
> To the point that I've *yet* to find somebody who can tell me how to 
> do it for the offending versions of 'Internet Mail Service'.
> 
> Or is it permanently broken, not configurable, and the organizations 
> afflicted with it need to be sent a 'Your clue must be ->THIS<- tall 
> to ride the Internet' notice?
> -- 
>   Valdis Kletnieks
>   Operating Systems Analyst
>   Virginia Tech
> 
> 


As of Exchange 5.0 (released in 1996), Exchange did not send auto-reply
or out-of-office notifications to messages that contain Precedence: bulk
or junk headers.  Exchange 2000 (released in 2000) also does not send
such messages to messages that contain Precedence: list.  

Both Exchange 5.5 (released in 1998) and Exchange 2000 ships,
out-of-the-box, with the configuration such that out-of-office messages
will not travel outside of the "Exchange organization", which is the
term for the collection of Exchange servers that are managed together.
This means that in order for any of these messages to travel out to the
Internet, an administrator has to make a conscious decision to enable
them.

One major difference between Exchange and vacation is that Exchange has
a capability of letting the administrator determine which "Internet
e-mail domains" may receive auto-forward, auto-reply, and out-of-office
messages.  The intent is to allow the administrator to be able to set a
policy of "no out-of-office messages to random people on the Internet,
but do allow them to go to our certain partners".  The main reason is
for security - you wouldn't necessarily want your competitors to be able
to mail your people and find out you all went to Vegas for the weekend.


In both Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 (we changed the administration
GUI in 2000), there is a "default" setting, and a per-domain setting.
The default setting applies to any domains that are not otherwise
matched.  As I stated above, the default setting is not to allow
out-of-office, auto-replies, or auto-forwards to the Internet.

So here is your step-by-step list of steps for someone to disable
out-of-office replies to the Internet (to change back to the default):

Exchange 5.5:
1) Open Microsoft Exchange Administrator
2) Navigate to the Internet Mail Service (you will have to do this set
of steps for each IMS that you have that sends mail outbound to the
Internet)
3) Double-click the IMS to see its properties
4) On the Internet Mail tab, click "Advanced options..."
5) On the Advanced options... Pane, check "Disable Out Of Office
Responses to the Internet"

Exchange 2000:
1) Open Exchange System Manager
2) Double-click "Global Settings" (in Exchange 2000, this is "global",
so you only need to do this in one place)
3) Click "Internet Mail Formats"
4) In the right-pane, on the "Default" item, right-click and select
"Properties"
5) On the "Advanced" tab, uncheck "Allow out of office responses" 

David


---
David Lemson
Lead Program Manager
Exchange Server
Microsoft Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:25:07 BST, Lloyd Wood said:

> message. Apparently the Microsoft stuff is quite hard to configure
> well.

To the point that I've *yet* to find somebody who can tell me how to
do it for the offending versions of 'Internet Mail Service'.

Or is it permanently broken, not configurable, and the organizations
afflicted with it need to be sent a 'Your clue must be ->THIS<- tall to
ride the Internet' notice?
-- 
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech


 PGP signature

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Keith Moore]

> If somebody has a "choose this tab, select that, type this" cookbook, please
> let me know

and me.  or post it to the list.  that way I can add it to the canned
text that I send out whenever I get one of those stupid vacation messages.

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 02:14:15PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jun 2001 18:44:41 BST, A James Lewis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  said:
> > I notice also that ALL of the autoresponder messages come from "Internet
> > Mail Service" Microsoft software No surprises there then!

> I used to send a canned note to people who did that, explaining that it
> was poor netiquette, but gave up when I noticed that:

> (a) 99% of the offenders were using that software
> (b) I have *yet* to find somebody who can tell me how to configure said
> software to not reply to mail that comes from owner-* or *-request addresses.

> If somebody has a "choose this tab, select that, type this" cookbook, please
> let me know

I went round and round with our people about this (we have over
70 lists with over 50,000 subscribers at Internet Security Systems).
Someone was finally able to tell me that recent versions of Exchange
will not autorespond to messages with Precedence set to "bulk" but will
autorespond to messages with no Precedence setting or with a Precedence
setting of "list".  They are keying on the string, not the numeric
value.  All of our list messages now go out with the "Precedence: bulk"
header to eliminate that much.

Of the remainder (older versions of Outlook and Exchange), many
violate SEVERAL rules of autoresponders such as never autoresponding
to an autoresponder an responding more that once to a given address.
If you think about it, this is a DoS attack waiting to happen.  Just get
a few of these and spoof messages them from each of them.  :-)  Fundamentally
evil and fundamentally SIMPLE.  And, yes, I know of one individual who
actually got fed up with two particular others and did that to them.  They
had been warned and they set up the autoresponders anyway.  They came
back to over 8,000 messages and mailboxes overlimit.  They blamed each other,
of course, and they were right...  Just for the wrong reasons.  :-)
And, no, it wasn't me that done that.

Recent versions of Outlook, Outlook Express, and Exchange avoid
both of those damaging misbehaviors as well, so it's only chumps^H^H^H^H^H^H
victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Husers with software that is overdue for an update.

> -- 
>   Valdis Kletnieks
>   Operating Systems Analyst
>   Virginia Tech

Mike
-- 
 Michael H. Warfield|  (770) 985-6132   |  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  (The Mad Wizard)  |  (678) 463-0932   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
  NIC whois:  MHW9  |  An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471|  possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[Valdis . Kletnieks]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2001 18:44:41 BST, A James Lewis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  said:
> I notice also that ALL of the autoresponder messages come from "Internet
> Mail Service" Microsoft software No surprises there then!

I used to send a canned note to people who did that, explaining that it
was poor netiquette, but gave up when I noticed that:

(a) 99% of the offenders were using that software
(b) I have *yet* to find somebody who can tell me how to configure said
software to not reply to mail that comes from owner-* or *-request addresses.

If somebody has a "choose this tab, select that, type this" cookbook, please
let me know
-- 
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech


 PGP signature

Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

[A James Lewis]

Is it me, or should these "Autoresponders" not be sending to a mailing
list... I always thought that it was "slapped wrists" for writing a
vacation type program that replied to a message like this?

I notice also that ALL of the autoresponder messages come from "Internet
Mail Service" Microsoft software No surprises there then!

Actually most of them are in a funny character set "windows-1252" or
somthing... go on, i need a laugh, what is it?

A. James Lewis ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Open Source Specialists  http://www.entora.co.uk/
Tel: +44 (0)701 0723686  Fax: +44 (0)870 3214368