[Techtalk] Auto-responders

[Terri Oda]

On 12-May-07, at 12:03 AM, Gareth Anderson wrote:
> I don't really use auto-responders very often but if I did, how do I
> configure it to not reply to mailing lists?
> Do you have to create some kind of blacklist for the auto-responder?

Mailing lists are sent with some special headers, including this one:

Precedence: 	list

A properly configured auto-responder will ignore any message sent out  
with Precedence: list (or bulk, I think).   You shouldn't have to  
create any special blacklists if your auto-responder is smart enough  
to understand this header.

I suspect the vast majority of mail clients with vacation programs  
are set up to do this correctly  (It's probably in the RFCs related  
to mail.) but fairly regularly someone sets up a quick hack to do it  
themselves, or downloads some random freeware or something and they  
end up accidentally spamming a lot of people (hundreds per mailing  
list if they reply to the list, or just the people who send mail to  
the list if they successfully respond to sender instead).   It's  
enough of a problem that it's part of why many mailing lists don't  
automatically send replies to the list by setting the reply-to:  
line.  (I watched a list send out hundreds and hundreds of messages  
as someone's rogue vacation program responded to someone, then  
responded to its response, then to the response to the response and  
so on...)

This is kinda off-topic for courses, though, so please direct any  
further discussion on this topic to techtalk.

  Teri