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:

0. 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?

1. 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:

2. 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:

3. Have you had any DNSBL listings due to OoO notifications? If yes, which DNSBLs?

4. 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