Re: Out of office replies
On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 6:40 AM, Jim Popovitch <yahoo@jimpop.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 07:29, Frank Lanitz <frank@frank.uvena.de> wrote:
>> On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:15:30 -0500 "Jim Popovitch" <yahoo@jimpop.com> wrote:
>>> Bah!! Headers change over time. The simple and easy way to solve
>>> OoO problems is for vacation responders to only reply to From:/Sender:
>>> if (and only if) To: == $recipient.
>>
>> This will not work since you got e.g. in Exchange virtuell recipients
>
> Virtual recipients shouldn't be a problem. The vacation responder
> (no matter where it exist in the process) shouldn't respond if To: !=
> $recipient (virtual recipient or not).
Sometimes you have a situation where the recipient is
fred@someplace.com, but that is forwarded to fred@someotherplace.com.
His auto-responder is on someotherplace.com. His mailserver won't
know that fred@someplace.com == fred@someotherplace.com and therefore
would never send any auto-replies. And before you say they can just
add the first-stop email address as an alias and have the responder
smart enough to know that they are the same address, he might have
been BCC'd into an email conversation and his mailserver would never
know who the original recipient would have been. In that case, you'll
have fewer auto-replies than you would have expected.
I believe that the easiest thing is to say is "Precedence: bulk" in
the header and hope for the best. If the auto-respond program (or
mailserver, whatever) sees it, don't auto-reply. That's the only
reliable thing I can think of, unless any mailservers on the way to
your mailbox remove it (but why would they?).
Dusty
(sorry Jim for replying to you directly, my mistake)
Reply to: