Re: Sorta OT - was: RE: Out of Office AutoReply

[Jay Plesset]

No decent MTA should be returning OOO messages to a mailing list.  Any such should be considered buggy, and fixed.  I know that the MTA I use (Sun JES Messaginag Server) doesn't return OOO messages to a group. It only returns OOO messages when the addressed "to" matches the entry in the user's mail or mailAlternateAddress. jay Loren Wilton wrote: Differentiating between personal accounts and company email systems, how do you all classify OOO messages? Personally if they are a reply to a mailing list I consider them spam, but generally not a spam that should be reported, merely one that should be quietly dropped. (There are exceptions.) Why do I consider them not reportable? Because: a) It is reasonable in some companies to subscribe from mailing lists at work b) Some companies REQUIRE that you have an OOO message if you are OOO. Some companies set them up automatically, or the person's boss does the day after the user goes on vacation. c) Not all people run Unix mail clients, and thus many either don't know how to do an OOO that will only respond in-company, or that won't respond to mailing list messages d) Most people (sigh) use MS mail "tools" (as I am) and the ffing MS idiots have never even considered the *possibility* that someone might want a different auto-response to a list message than a personal message. Or to a spam. The result is OOO messages, even if the person would like that to not happen. So I have a moderately decent filter rule in OE that catches most of them and quietly deletes them. Seems a reasonable compromise for things that most people really can't control. Now, there are eggregious cases that are reportable. Like the idiots in customer service at some companies that signed the "customer comments" mailbox up to a bunch of mailing lists, so anytime a message is posted the company sends out a "thank you for your inquiry about our wonderful products; someone will get back to you in several days". Or the autoresponders that autorespond to their own OOO messages with another OOO message. Loren