[Mailman-Users] Out-of-office replies

[Tim Potter]

Christopher P. Lindsey writes:

> > Unless the vacation program quotes back the message it is reponding
> > to, it is difficult for Mailman to distinguish between a vacation
> > loop and am active poster.  That said, implementing something like
> > Formail's MsgID cache for Mailman, except instead of cacheing
> > MessageIDs cacheing MD5's of message bodies might be a good idea...

I have some filters set up to catch things like this but it
doesn't work 100% of the time, especially on the French and
German out of office auto replies.

Unfortunately I don't think there is any foolproof method of
catching them.  The correct solution is for mailman to mark the
messages as Precedence: bulk, which it does, and for the vacation
software to not reply to messages marked as such.  There is a lot
of dodgy software out there that doesn't conform to this though.
The sad thing is mailman also sets the errors-to header to point
at the admin address so vacation software that replies to list
mail and sends it to the list is doubly broken.

I usually send a message off to people who have spammed the list
with their replies and then manaully bounce them.  


Tim.