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bad autoresponders

merlyn on 2003-12-23T14:17:54

Of course, the holidays brings out one of the recurring problems I see on the net, and raises my blood pressure level accordingly.

I'm talking about bad autoresponders. People leave for the holidays, and set up an "I'm away until Jan XX" message.

In the ancient days of the net, the protocol for autoresponders was well-established, to prevent "autoreponding storms". Namely:

  • All autoresponding mail must set a precedence of junk in the header.
  • All mailing list mail is marked precedence bulk.
  • No autoresponder is allowed to respond to any mail marked with either precedence junk or bulk.
The rules worked. No reply-storms (where an autoreply agent replies to an autoreply, causing another round until all disk is consumed), and no spurious autoreplies to list mail.

But I must get about one message a week from an autoreply agent for a mailing list message I've posted. Mind you, I don't mind if it was a reply from email I directly sent them because of a CC in the header. But if I address email only to the list, I should never get a reply mail.

And yet I do.

The clueless are leading the blind here. Either these people are hand-constructing their own reply agents without regard for the standards (dangerous) or there's some common software out there that end-users can use that isn't following the standard (unethical).

Darn. I long for a real net again.

Let me also add another good rule...

Purdy on 2003-12-23T16:37:39

Though this won't be as eloquent as you have stated... ;)

Maintain a db of addresses and do not auto-respond if the address already exists in the db.

Re:Let me also add another good rule...

merlyn on 2003-12-23T18:09:12

Yes, I have that on my autoresponder (with varying timeouts, up to 28 days for the normal FAQ notification), and I have one other rule:
  • Never autorespond with a "from" equal to the address of the trigger.
Thus, when you send a message to merlyn@stonehenge.com, you get an auto response from merlyn's-answering-machine. And if you reply to that (broken autoresponder), you get a message from postmaster saying that's not a valid address. If you autorespond to that, only the duplicate address database prevents a re-response. But at that point, I now have a lot of ammunition for flaming the guy for being clueless.

Re:Let me also add another good rule...

pudge on 2003-12-31T20:08:07

Another good rule:
  • Never have only one element in a list
  • Don't add additional elements just for the sake of following the first rule

the grass is always greener in hindsight

jmm on 2003-12-23T16:45:10

I think I saw the same posting in 1985, 1990, 1995, and most years in between.

Those rules have never been fully successful. There have always been newcomers who have not yet learned them, and who get heavily blasted the first time they transgress. They usually learn, but are replaced with the next beginners. Even if most newcomers find out in advance how to do the right thing without a public mistake, there have alway been some who didn't.

Policy

Robrt on 2003-12-23T19:56:10

If you autorespond to a mailing list I have control over, and I notice, you will be unsubscribed.

That is all.