Hi Matthias et al
Out-of-Office notifications are not just "nonsense" as you state in your mail. In a very service-oriented business, where the person-to-person relationship is important, it makes sense for the customer to know, that his personal contact is not available.
Please Remember: Technology should be here to help people solve their problems, not the other way around. So instead of focusing on how to stop OoO, why not try to find a technically "clean" way for OoO.
People need it, so let's give it to them, but in a proper way.
Now for the technical part:
- We all agree OoO should not be sent to Mailinglists. This can usually be achieved by checking for precedence "bulk" and not replying to those.
- OoO should not reply to Spam. Difficult to do, because it's hard to separate spam from ham automated, as we all know.
- OoO should only be sent once per mail address (default with FreeBSD vacation, also possible with sieve scripts)
- OoO should be clearly recognizable as such by automated mail handlers. Maybe a standard already exists? Probably not. This could be a way to a solution (maybe a new X- Header Field, so recipients can filter out OoO it not needed)
- OoO should be clearly recognizable by humans
And finally to your questions:
1. Yes 2. No reply to Spam, Only 1 reply per Mail-Address 3. No 4. No special handling
Cheers, Viktor
Matthias Leisi wrote:
Hi there,
I'm trying to gather arguments to stop the Out-of-Office notification nonsense. I know the technical arguments against OoO and other forms of auto-responders, but I'm interested to learn how different organisations are handling it.
If you don't want to answer publicly, please respond to me directly (matthias@leisi.net - remember that the Swinog list overrides my Reply-To: header). I will respect any requests for anonymous handling, but I will send a summary to the list.
You may also answer in verbose form instead of using the questionnaire below :)
My questions:
- What kind of organisation are you answering for (eg for your ISP
staff, for your ISP customers, for your company users etc.)? About how many users do you handle?
- Does your organisation allow OoO to external recipients?
If you answer no to question 1, no further questions required :) If you answer yes, please continue below:
- Do you have any restrictions as to when/how OoO notifications are sent?
[ ] No restriction _or_ [ ] No OoO to detected spam [ ] OoO only to senders in the user's address book [ ] Only to senders with matching SPF/DKIM/Sender-Id etc [ ] Other restriction:
Have you had any DNSBL listings due to OoO notifications? If yes, which DNSBLs?
How do you send out OoO notifications?
[ ] No special handling [ ] Over a dedicated IP address
Thanks a lot for your contribution, -- Matthias _______________________________________________ swinog mailing list swinog@lists.swinog.ch http://lists.swinog.ch/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/swinog