ID10T out of office responders (was Re: Yahoo DMARC breakage)

Fri Apr 11 08:05:48 UTC 2014

On Fri, 11 Apr 2014, Tei wrote:

> Suppose I configure my email to send a "Thanks, we have received your
> email, we will reply shortly in office hours.". Whats the Holy Headers
> so even poorly configured servers don't cause a AutoReply Storm?
> Googling, I found "Precedence", "X-Auto-Response-Suppress",..?     For
> something like this, normally I would scan lots of opensource projects
> in  www.google.com/codesearch  (so I can learn from the projects with
> a large number of hours in production)  , but seems down at the
> moment.

If that's what you want to do, then setting one or more of these may help:

  Auto-submitted: auto-generated
  X-Auto-Response-Suppress: OOF
  Precendence: bulk

(Other values of the last two are possible).

RFC3834 is background reading and references Auto-submitted:.  
X-Auto-Response-Suppress: is used by MS Exchange/Outlook.

But if those servers really are "poorly configured", there's no guarantee 
they will honour any of those anyway.

If you want more control for yourself, you need to filter the return 
messages out.  I do this in Exim to identify "automatically generated 
email" to be thrown away in some circumstances:

  condition = ${if or { \
    { match {$h_precedence:} {(?i)junk|bulk|list} } \
    { eq {$sender_address} {} } \
    { def:header_X-Cron-Env: } \
    { def:header_Auto-Submitted: } \
    { def:header_List-Id: } \
    { def:header_List-Help: } \
    { def:header_List-Unsubscribe: } \
    { def:header_List-Subscribe: } \
    { def:header_List-Owner: } \
    { def:header_List-Post: } \
    { def:header_List-Archive: } \
    { def:header_Autorespond: } \
    { def:header_X-Autoresponse: } \
    { def:header_X-Autoreply-From: } \
    { def:header_X-eBay-MailTracker: } \
    { def:header_X-MaxCode-Template: } \
    { match {$h_X-Auto-Response-Suppress: } {OOF} } \
    { match {$h_X-OS:} {HP Onboard Administrator} } \
    { match {$h_X-MimeOLE:} {\N^Produced By phpBB2$\N} } \
    { match {$h_Subject:} {\N^Yahoo! Auto Response$\N} } \
    { match {$h_Subject:} {\N^ezmlm warning$\N} } \
    { match {$h_X-FC-MachineGenerated:} {true} } \
    { match {$h_X-Spam-Flag:} {\N^yes\N} } \
    { match {$message_body} {\N^Your \"cron\" job on\N} } \
    { match {$h_Subject:} {\N^Out of Office\N} } \
    { match {$h_Subject:} {\N^Auto-Reply:\N} } \
    { match {$h_Subject:} {\N^Autoresponse:\N} } \
    { match {$h_Subject:} {\N(Auto Reply)$\N} } \
    { match {$h_Subject:} {\N(Out of Office)$\N} } \
    { match {$h_Subject:} {\Nis out of the office.$\N} } \
    { match {$h_From:} {\N(via the vacation program)\N } } \
    { ! match {$header_To: $header_CC: $header_Bcc: \
         $header_Resent-To: $header_Resent-Cc: $header_Resent-Bcc:} \
    } \
                       } {no} {yes} \
               }

(I have not reviewed this for a very long time).  Be careful.

Jethro.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
Jethro R Binks, Network Manager,
Information Services Directorate, University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, number SC015263.