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merlyn (47)
merlyn@stonehenge.com
http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/
AOL IM: realmerlyn (Add Buddy, Send Message)
Yahoo! ID: realmerlyn (Add User, Send Message)
PAUSE-ID: MERLYN [cpan.org].
See my home page [stonehenge.com].
bad autoresponders
I'm talking about bad autoresponders. People leave for the holidays, and set up an "I'm away until Jan XX" message.
In the ancient days of the net, the protocol for autoresponders was well-established, to prevent "autoreponding storms". Namely:
- All autoresponding mail must set a precedence of junk in the header.
- All mailing list mail is marked precedence bulk.
- No autoresponder is allowed to respond to any mail marked with either precedence junk or bulk.
The rules worked. No reply-storms (where an autoreply agent replies to an autoreply, causing another round until all disk is consumed), and no spurious autoreplies to list mail.
But I must get about one message a week from an autoreply agent for a mailing list message I've posted. Mind you, I don't mind if it was a reply from email I directly sent them because of a CC in the header. But if I address email only to the list, I should never get a reply mail.
And yet I do.
The clueless are leading the blind here. Either these people are hand-constructing their own reply agents without regard for the standards (dangerous) or there's some common software out there that end-users can use that isn't following the standard (unethical).
Darn. I long for a real net again.
--Larry Wall in stab.c from the perl source code
Let me also add another good rule... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maintain a db of addresses and do not auto-respond if the address already exists in the db.
Reply to This
Re:Let me also add another good rule... (Score:4, Interesting)
- Never autorespond with a "from" equal to the address of the trigger.
Thus, when you send a message to merlyn@stonehenge.com, you get an auto response from merlyn's-answering-machine. And if you reply to that (broken autoresponder), you get a message from postmaster saying that's not a valid address. If you autorespond to that, only the duplicate address database prevents a re-response. But at that point, I now have a lot of ammunition for flaming the guy for being clueless.Reply to This
Parent
Re:Let me also add another good rule... (Score:2)
the grass is always greener in hindsight (Score:3, Insightful)
Those rules have never been fully successful. There have always been newcomers who have not yet learned them, and who get heavily blasted the first time they transgress. They usually learn, but are replaced with the next beginners. Even if most newcomers find out in advance how to do the right thing without a public mistake, there have alway been some who didn't.
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Policy (Score:1)
If you autorespond to a mailing list I have control over, and I notice, you will be unsubscribed.
That is all.