Re: Out of office replies
On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 12:50 AM, Izak Burger <isburger@gmail.com> wrote:
>> "Stephen Vaughan" <stephenvaughan@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> When will people learn not to set auto replies
>
> Nothing wrong with a proper auto-reply (one that does some decent
> caching, only replies once a day, avoids mailing lists and things with
> precedence: bulk, etc etc).
>
> The problem IMHO is that that is so hard to do. For example, our own
> auto-reply exim router (as requested by clients) checks for about 16
> different headers in an attempt to avoid the most common non-human
> entities (mailman, roundup, eBay).
>
> So first prize is not having to use an auto-reply at all. Second prize
> is one that checks for common headers at the very least. If you don't
> have enough control over this (for example you're running exchange)
> you should either not subscribe that email address to a list, or you
> should not use the vacation feature.
Considering the wide number of installs of Exchange, you'd think
they'd eventually fix that *in* Exchange and not require any kind of
addon or special user actions. As most things Microsoft, I'm
surprised they make so much money off of this product. I understand
it's difficult, but if they aren't willing to do the job, they
shouldn't have signed up for the job. You sell mailserver software,
you make it not do stupid things. Seems simple to me.
I understand that it takes both sides to fix the problem: mailing
list software to send the headers to be obvious that there shouldn't
be an auto-reply, mailserver software to read the headers and
therefore not auto-reply.
FYI: I have to admin Exchange... and I hate it.
Dusty
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