On 29 Dec 2012, at 8:33, Tim Smith wrote:
I am looking to incorporate some "Out Of Office" functionality with my dovecot/postfix set up. I need this to work with a variety of email clients if those clients support that functionality. Ideally, it would work "out of teh box" much in the same way that Outlook sets the "Out Of Office" message but I think this works because it may be a a MS Exchange server providing that functionality.
Please do the world a favor and DON'T do this in the brain-dead way Exchange does. 100% of my messages to mailing lists in the past 2 weeks have received one or more out-of-office replies from list members with shoddily managed mail systems, i.e. default Outlook/Exchange without external controls over the chronic MS misbehaviors. I expect that this message will trigger at least one such "helpful" notice. Also keep in mind: mail forgery is trivial and identification of mailing list traffic is unreliable. Sending OOO autoreplies outside of your own domain(s) will eventually include sending some that someone will regret.
A mail system configured in a security-conscious manner will be very selective and cautious about sending OOO auto-replies. The naive Outlook/Exchange norm can provide useful insights on the vacation/attention schedules of users without forcing the curious investigator to talk to a human or provide any justification for being privy to such information. Users offered such a feature should be warned that they should not put anything in an OOO autoreply that they would not want shared with competitors and burglars. I have seen cases of members of each of those groups using careless OOO autoreplies to their profit.
