[posted and cc'ed]
On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> I haven't found it a problem. I'm on a LOT of lists, and post a
> reasonable amount, and so far the volume of vacation messages I get is in
> the noise, as compared to, say, the volume of spam I get.
I agree that it is currently a minor annoyance, and not a serious problem.
But I try to warn against it because it doesn't scale. That is, if
everyone on vacation behaved the same way, it would turn into a serious
enough problem that people may be reluctant to post to large lists.
> Now, on a more practical note, how would people on this list recommend
> configuring an autoresponder so that it ignores list traffic entirely,
> short of having to configure each list individually?
Well, I've put in a shameless plug for my rant twice. But I guess this
calls for a third time
http://www.goldmark.org/netrants/auto-resp/
The most relevant part is:
=================
Proper auto-responders (among other things) shouldn't respond to messages
posted to mailing lists. There are several tricks that auto-responders
traditionally use to achieve this.
1. They only respond to messages with a specific address in the To: or
Cc: fields of an email message. For example, if I set up an
auto-responder, I should set it so that it only sends a response to
mail that is explicitly addressed to jeffrey@goldberg.org. I could list a
handful of alternatives addresses as well to be responded to. Most
auto-responders do this by default.
=================
That is how autoresponder have been designed since the begining of
autoresponders. You tell them only to respond to mail that explicitly
names you in the headers. That makes configuration simple and easy.
The advantage of this is that you don't have to worry about lists that you
might have forgotten. If you are on a list where it might be appropriate
to have such autoresponses then you add that list address specfically to
the "handful of alternative addressess to be responded to."
As I've been trying to say. The problem I and others are complaining
about has been solved for decades. I am just asking people to use that
solution.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice
Hate spam? Boycott MCI! http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/anti-spam/mci/
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