[techtalk] UNIX Autoresponder and email aliasing help needed

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 12:26:23AM -0700 or thereabouts, curious wrote:
> *WARNING* be sure to TEST your autoresponder BEFORE going away anywhere...
> THINK mailing list.. THINK of whathappens when a responder REPLYS to a
> mailing list message.. (it recives it's OWN REPLY which it then REPLYS
> TO!)

...the classic example used to be "when two people's vacation programs
start talking to each other" :) "Not here" Boing! "I'm not here either!"
Boing! "Thanks for your message. I'm not here" Boing! "Thanks for your
message. I'm not here either!" Boing! 

(cue mail spools filling up rapidly)

These days, they are supposed not to do this. Both vacation and
mailing list software are supposed to be brighter; and setting 
reply-to to the list is happily less common. But accidents happen. 

I must say, I do loathe the practice of setting up these programs and 
leaving them replying to mailing lists. I don't think they usually go 
to the entire list the way curious describes above: but I have often 
received auto-responses directly to me after I have posted to a mailing 
list. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Sorry :) If the list has 20 
messages a day, or a dozen different people posting in a day, you -are- 
going to annoy quite a few people daily, even if most people are more 
tolerant than I am. 

Are you -sure- you want to do this? :) 

You mentioned procmail in your original post. There are pointers both
to 'man procmailex' and to some sort of auto-responder "build your own" 
collection of bits in the Procmail Mini-FAQ (which is not well-named: 
it's 140k): the FAQ is at 
http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/users/reriksso/procmail/mini-faq.html
and the pointer is down at the bottom of it in
http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/users/reriksso/procmail/mini-faq.html#vacation-etc

Telsa