Philip Maddocks/CORP/BROOKFIELD is out of the office.

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, pmaddocks-9U2EIkBaTy57jpW2VZu3qypHNdL/HXVq at public.gmane.org wrote:

> I will be out of the office starting  23/08/2007 and will not return until
> 24/08/2007.
>
> I will respond to your message when I return.

Hi Philip. It's a shame that after all these years some out of office 
(OOO) software still replies to mailing lists and people who send to 
mailing lists.  The reality is that it is trivial to avoid doing this.

Email sent via a list always has the "Precedence:" header to set to bulk, 
junk or list[1].  The OOO software need only check that to see if a reply 
is needed.  The Unix vacation(1) program has worked this way for a very 
long time (15-20 years I believe).

I encourage everyone who has OOO software that is replying to list mail to 
send an email along to your vendor encouraging them to apply the trivial 
fix that will prevent this problem from occuring.  Or better yet, switch 
to open source software which is typically better behaved.

I just felt this was a great opportunity to complain about a problem which 
is trivial to fix and yet goes unfixed in some software year after year.

Cheers,

[1] I suppose there may be badly behaved lists that do not do this but I 
am not aware of any.

Rob

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"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine..."
 	-- RFC 1925 "The Twelve Networking Truths"
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