On May 14, 2009, at 3:18 AM, Barney Desmond wrote:
2009/5/14 Scott Haneda <talkli...@newgeo.com>:
So If I am getting this correct, auto-reply is not something native
to
postfix other than in a very basic form, and I should look to 3rd
party
solutions that have matured?
Correct, it is an invention on top of SMTP mail. I blame Exchange and
its ilk for leading people to believe that it's all part-and-parcel.
An autoresponder is just like a monkey sitting at the user's
workstation, replying to all the mail that comes in. You'll notice
that the monkey has nothing to do with SMTP or Postfix.
Preaching to the choir :) No matter how much I tell clients that
there is danger, auto-reply loops on badly set up systems, reply to
spam etc, they still want them.
I find that more than half of the auto responders out there reply to
the reply-to header, which is terrible.
On a daily basis I get a good chunk of bounces from whatever clients
have enabled auto reply on my old email server.
The only good I see coming from it, is when a client complains about
"too much spam", I point them to my initial email and the verbiage at
the top of the web form for enabling auto reply, where I warned them,
setting auto reply once, is something you can never recover from in
regards to getting more spam. Change your email address, or agree to
get more spam.
And christ, doesn't everyone have a mobile that can check email, and
deal with the important ones?
I suppose (hypothetically musing) it could have been designed into the
protocol, but I bet it'd be so terrible in implementation that SMTP
wouldn't be as good (hah!) as it is today.
Ha Ha. Hey, anything that has stood use since what, the early 70's,
amazing in any book. And this is not a protocol relegated to
obscurity, it is used billions and billions of times a day.
Thanks for the dialogue, I will look for the best 3rd party solution
to solve something I wish I did not have to think about.
--
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *
