[Mailman-Users] Detecting Autoresponders

[Mark Sapiro]

Karl Zander wrote:

>Is there something specific Mailman is looking for to detect autoreponders, like Out of Office messages?  We had an incident this weekend with an autoresponder sending an out of office message over and over and over....to a list.  
>
[...]
>
>But I am not sure what Mailman looks at when trying to determine what is an out of office or other automatic message.


As far as posting to a list is concerned, Mailman is looking for an
X-BeenThere: header with the list address. It does look at a
Precedence: header and will not process commands from or autorespond
to Precedence 'bulk', 'junk' or 'list' messages, but it will forward
them to the list if they aren't held, rejected or discarded for some
other reason. It doesn't specifically try to identify autoresponses.

I would say the autoresponder is broken if it is responding repeatedly
to the same address on behalf of the same recipient. I would also say
it's broken it it responds to the list for an individual message (not
a digest) unless the list is anonymous and puts the list address in
the From: of delevered posts. Finally, this is probably more
controversial, but I think it's broken if it can't identify its own
autoresponses from Message-ID: or something else and not respond to
one of its own messages.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan