Out of Office Replies

[Fraser Campbell]

On Wednesday 10 September 2003 12:49, James Knott wrote:

> > There's only two solutions that I can think of:
> >
> > - Microsoft gets smart enough to insert a special header into their
> > messages indicating that it is an automated message (I haven't seen such
> > a header), this would make it easy to filter out.
> > - In the original mail that I send, I set some header that makes
> > Outlook's autoresponder not respond to the email
> >
> > Anyone know if something like the above exists?
>
> I thought that was a function of the mail server.  A few years ago, I
> worked at a company that used Lotus Notes.  The out of office messages
> were sent only to internal addresses.

No, an email client can add headers if it wants.  I'm not exactly sure of RFC 
compliance but I think you can add a header X-anything without concern.  For 
example a common header is "X-Mailer: mutt (blah, blah)".

My first suggestion was that there be a convention for autoresponse messages 
to contain a header like "X-Message-Type: vacation".  This way if you were 
sending bulk email you could ignore the hundreds of autoresponses simply by 
filtering on that header.  As far as I know there's no such convention.

My second hope was that Microsoft's autoresponder (let's say the one built 
into Outlook) is smart enough to not reply to messages that set certain 
headers.  A common header for mailing lists is "Precedence: list", if lookout 
wouldn't respond to those then problem solved for mailing lists and senders 
of bulk mail.  "Precedence: bulk" is also common.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Halton Hills, Ontario, Canada                       Debian GNU/Linux

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