An aside: On Wed, Apr 09, 2014 at 05:15:59PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:
Maybe this is a good thing - we can stop getting all the "sorry I'm out of the office" emails when posting to a list.
I entirely support that goal, but my preferred solution is the complete eradication of the software (a lot of which makes mistakes that have been well-known as mistakes for decades) and thus the entire practice of setting up "out of office" messages. Out-of-office notices might have had some relevance 20 or 30 years ago when much of the population was new to email and had not yet grasped in *any* sense how it works. And when there was a large overlap between "people who use email" and "people who read/send email from their offices and only from their offices". But I think by now everyone who is capable of being educated has been educated and realizes that the one of the reasons for the absence of a response is that the recipient hasn't seen the relevant message yet. There's really no need to spin the roulette wheel and hope that the combination of MUAs and MTAs on both ends is functional enough to enable the out-of-office software (optimistically presuming it's halfway sane) to figure out what it should do. And that's before we even get to the security and privacy issues that are in play, which are substantial. So while there are numerous approaches to solving the problem of errant out-of-office messages, and some of those approaches work pretty well in the field, I would prefer to kill the problem by attacking the source: the *existence* of out-of-office autoresponders. ---rsk