Out of office/vacation messages

Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu
Fri Jan 2 19:51:17 UTC 2004


On Fri, 02 Jan 2004 13:56:05 EST, "McBurnett, Jim" said:

> RULE #1: If from owner-nanog at merit.edu
> Move the email to "NANOG EMAILS WHILE I WAS OUT SO I DON'T GET FLAMED
> FOLDER."
> Stop Processing more rules

... RULE #2: if from owner-otherlist at someplace.com
... RULE #3: if from owner-newlist at someplace.net
...
... RULE #65: If from owner-yet-another-list at somewhere.net...

Must really suck to put ALL those rules on and take them off every time you go
on vacation.  (Yes, I'm on at least 65 mailing lists - and that's just the ones
high-volume enough to warrant filtering to their own folder).  And even if you're
on only 4 or 5 lists, that's enough work to mean it's likely you'll forget one.

So you have a choice of nuking *all* OoO messages for *everybody* on the server
(even when the OoO message is a *good* idea), or hand-installing all those
rules every time you go on vacation (and if you have screen-shots, you
hand-installed, since it's hard to take a screenshot of a script ;).

On the other hand, BSD 'vacation' came out in 1983, and understood the basic
concept waaay back when.  All you're managing to do is say "I figured out how
to do something once for every single list I'm on, every time I go on vacation,
that other systems have been managing to do for their users automatically,
without issues if you forget to do it for one of your lists, for 2 decades".

Hardly a selling point for your choice of software.  Unless it's a disguised
"My management makes me use software so broken I have to...." story?

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