[15997] in Athena Bugs
Re: Potential future problem with auto-acks
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Albert Dvornik)
Fri Jun 26 16:13:04 1998
Reply-To: bert-olc@MIT.EDU
To: Matt Braun <matt@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bug-olc@MIT.EDU
From: Albert Dvornik <bert@genscan.com>
Date: 26 Jun 1998 16:12:10 -0400
In-Reply-To: Matt Braun's message of Fri, 26 Jun 1998 15:16:02 -0400 (EDT)
I'm not sure if tooltime and/or postmaster are appropriate for this.
(I don't even know what tooltime *is*.) So you should forward if
appropriate...
Matt Braun <matt@MIT.EDU> writes:
> 1. The hotline category does not yet send auto-acks like computing-help
>
> 2. matisse sends its mail from daemon@mit.edu
I can think of a few different things to do to make the "auto-ack" tools
more robust. I'm not sure I'll do it RSN for olcm, though. =)
* Envelope address
* Auto-responses should always be sent out mail with the SMTP
envelope-from address set to <>. (This means that well-behaved mail
agents won't return bounces if delivery fails.)
* We could hack servers' sendmail.cf files to pass the incoming
envelope-from address into the program in question via the command
line. (I seem to remember this is possible...) If the envelope-
from is <>, the program should either throw away the mail, or do the
usual thing but not auto-respond.
* We could teach auto-responders about the others' mail addresses to
make them avoid replying to each other. Of course, this only works
until someone adds a new auto-responder... >=)
* Precedence
* All auto-mailers should probably insert `Precedence: bulk' into
their outgoing headers.
* All auto-mailers should probably ignore mail with specified
precedence of `bulk' or `junk'.
--bert
