On Jul 12, 2007, at 22:03, Douglas Otis wrote:
On Jul 12, 2007, at 8:33 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
That doesn't help much, because then we all still get private
vacation messages. Please kick these people off the list.
The web interface for Mailman allows subscribers to re-enable their
account to receive messages when deliveries bounce too often. As
such an account might become "disabled" without notice. In the
subscriber's management web-page, a message could indicate that a
reason for messages being disabled may also include use of auto-
replies. Not sending to such an account responding with auto-
responses takes care of the problem. Such auto responses will
appear as duplicate messages and should be rather easy to
automatically detect. Disabling the account in this manner should
be painless, where of course a subscriber would then need to notice
a lack of traffic. This lack of traffic should prompt them to
check their account status, and click the enable radio button.
Shutting off their list email when we don't need to seems kind of
drastic. Perhaps I'm overly sensitive to it, having been dropped
from a list in the past for the crime of not having an MX host up and
accepting messages 100% of the time (i.e., no greylisting and no
downtime allowed). And after coming back from a week's vacation,
while poring over hundreds of messages, I doubt the first thing on my
mind would be, "oh, I don't seem to have piles of mail from the IETF
list flaming about autoreply bots and NATs, maybe I should check my
subscription".
Like I suggested before, switching them to digest mode would still
get the list content to them. While the autoresponders would
presumably still answer those messages, the replies would not be to
individual contributors. They'd presumably be to the list (where we
could suspend their posting privileges while they're away, and of
course notify them that they have to contact the list admins to get
them restored, or teach mailman to treat certain autoreply messages
as administrivia to be filtered out), or to a list management address
(where, if mailman can't be taught to deal automatically, it would
"merely" be the list admins' problem).
It shouldn't be hard to convince mailman that subjects matching
patterns "^out of office autoreply:" or "^autoreply:", for example,
should be rejected (bounced to sender) or discarded (distasteful to
me, on the miniscule chance that someone would have the misfortune to
select a subject like "autoreply: useful practice or tool of the
devil?" for a legitimate message on email reply bots, that would
quietly never get delivered). In fact, I suspect doing so would
address 95% of the problems, without having to suspend anyone's
mail. Though fully automated processing of such messages would mean
autoreply messages saying "Joe has moved, please update your list to
send to joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" would never be seen...
So, maybe "^out of office autoreply" should be discarded or bounced,
and "^autoreply:" should be held for moderation just in case, with
the normal response being to switch to digest mode, suspend posting
privileges (bouncing the autoreply messages back into the offender's
mailbox, to ensure some incentive exists for them to fix the
problem), and send a warning note?
Ken
_______________________________________________
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf