"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>I developed a script to support holiday messages. It appears to work very
>nicely with one important exception (that I expected): if a person on
>holiday sends a message to another person on holiday, they get an infinite
>loop of holiday notifications to each other (thank God for quota
>enforcement!)
That's not really a loop, which is when a single message travels a
curcular path, it's a ping-pong (or circle jerk, to use a cruder
term), which is when two autoresponders respond to each other.
>Anyway, below is the guts of my script, which is pretty basic. So my
>question to y'all is, what logic do other "holiday" algorithms employ to
>prevent such looping?
They keep track of which addresses they've responded to, and only send
one per vacation, one per day, one per hour, etc. They also look for
"Precedence: bulk", don't reply to MAILER_DAEMON amd postmaster,
etc. Basically, this is a tricky job, and it's best left to the
experts.
Peter Samuel has written a nice vacation program for qmail. From the
man page:
AUTHOR
Peter Samuel, Uniq Professional Services
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
AVAILABILITY
The latest version of vacation for qmail should always be available from
ftp://ftp.uniq.com.au/pub/tools
-Dave
