Salut,
Since we receive a bunch of out-of-office replies on every post to swinog, why not use it for something useful? This is what I came up with.
The german c't magazine is publishing an annual survey of IT related jobs with regard to income and working conditions. We could now monitor the amount of holidays taken per swinog user and match it to their profession, so we get a clear survey of how many holidays people may take if they have a certain title.
For the technical implementation part, it would suffice to install a mail filter on the mail servers of the most active swinog posters. This filter would automatically authenticate cryptographically to an interface and send the name of the person it received an out-of-office reply from. The interface would then deduce that this person is on a holiday, and update its statistics.
This is valuable information! Maybe we should all misconfigure our /usr/libexec/vacation in order to get better results.
Tonnerre