The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail ' <draft-moore-auto-email-response-05.txt> as a Proposed Standard This document has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an IETF Working Group. The IESG contact person is Ned Freed. Technical Summary This memo makes recommendations for software that automatically responds to incoming electronic mail messages, including "out of the office" or "vacation" response generators, mail filtering software, email-based information services, and other automatic responders. The purpose of these recommendations is to discourage undesirable behavior which is caused or aggravated by such software, to encourage uniform behavior (where appropriate) among automatic mail responders, and to clear up some sources of confusion among implementors of automatic email responders. This document also defines the auto-submitted header field, whose purpose is to indicate that the message was originated by an automatic process, or an automatic responder, rather than by a human; and to facilitate automatic filtering of messages from signal paths for which automatically generated messages and automatic responses are not desirable. Working Group Summary This document was discussed on the ietf-822 mailing list but is not the product of an IETF working group. The document has been revised in resonse to several comments received during last call. Protocol Quality Ned Freed reviewed the document for the IESG.
