About my Out of Office response email

[Fraser Campbell]

On Monday 26 April 2004 17:56, John Li wrote:

> First of all I feel really sorry about the annoying that those Out of
> Office emails brought to you and I was surprised also this morning when I
> got back to office. It's not working the way I setup the responding rule
> because I only setup to respond emails directly sent to me, not to the
> email list !

Apology accepted.

> After digging into the list archive and my email history with the help from
> my system admin, I feel it's very necessary to tell you guys what have
> happened.
>
> 1. There is no Out of Office email in the list archive so I am assuming my
> email program didn't send that email to the list address.

Thankfully it didn't, otherwise the list would have melted down.  Sending an 
outofoffice message more than once per day to a given address is asking for 
trouble regardless of whether it's a mailing list or not.

Your auto responder sent a response to everyone that posted recently and for 
every single post.  I'd be interested/suprised to hear from anyone that 
didn't receive your message after posting to the list in the past week (or 
so).

> 2. Not every one got Out of Office response when they posted their message
> to the list.

Certainly I could be wrong but I doubt this, maybe I'm special and that's why 
I got so many from you.  Maybe I should lay of the crack, did I imagine the 
dozen+ emails that you sent to me?

> 4. A guy send out a email with my contact info to the list on Apr 24 and
> the email log indicates it's from node1.opengeometry.net. Please note this
> is obviously violating my privacy !!!

That was a very strange thing to do, I really didn't see the point.

Your contact information is fully public though so he really didn't reveal 
anything that someone with a brain couldn't have found anyway.

> 5. I got some people using telnet into my email server and send me email
> directly
> 6. A lot of email sent to me directly by telnet into my email server and
> impersonating they are from email addresses who claimed they got the Out of
> Office response.

They used telnet to connect to the smtp port and send email or they used 
telnet to connect to the telnet servive of your mail server?  If they 
telnetted to use smtp how would you know that???

> Based on those, it's clearly that this event could possibly caused by
> someone intentionally or by some kind of virus out there but not on my
> systems. I did the proper setup so please don't blame on me any more.

Your outofoffice was screwed up.  Everyone makes mistakes / software often 
doesn't work the way we'd like.


> Also I want to point out that item no. 4 is extremely un-acceptable and I
> want that guy try his best to remove the impact ASAP. I will hold my right
> on that according to Canadian law and please remember your information is
> logged everywhere as well.

The correct action would have been the removal of your address from the 
mailing list immediately upon it being obvious that you weren't responding to 
the complaints (you were out of office after all).  Unfortunately 
tlug-owner-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org (and owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org) seems to be a black hole, I've 
emailed several times to that address in the past about problems and have 
never received a response.  Without a list admin that cares these problems 
can never be dealt with appropriately.

> Hopefully you guys are still reading this and let's build the clean, safer
> community together.

That sounds like a good plan.

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