[Mailman-Users] Detecting Autoresponders

[Karl Zander]

On Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:15:11 -0700
 Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:
>
>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 think I found out what happened.  The mailserver has a built in rule that people can enable for out of office messages.  That rule knows how to deal with lists.

It actually checks that the message header does not contain any of the following fields:

    Precedence: bulk
    Precedence: junk
    Precedence: list
    X-List*
    X-Mirror*
    X-Auto*
    X-Mailing-List 

and will not auto respond if it does.

However, the built in rule only responds once to a message and tracks the address so it does not send the out of office again.  

Well, staff did not like that.  So another rule was created that responded to every message with the out of office.  That rule did not do any of the Precedence checks and quite happily created the loop.

The servers built in  autoresponder is not broken, but the other rule is.

Thanks everyone for your input.  

--Karl