Automatic mail answerers

[d...@mrvax.dec]

An even more amusing situation can occur when a person sends mail to
somebody to say he is going out of town, then sets up his own answering
maching -- if the other person already had an answerer set up! The
infinite loop can be avoided if automatic mail answerers are coded to keep
track of who they have already sent to, and send no more than once to a
given address.

This is implemented in the (otherwise despicable) VMS mail system, and has
saved a lot of trouble.

(This by itself will also prevent SOME of the deluge to moderators, but
the individual- and site-specific don't-reply-to lists that Lauren suggests
will do it better.)

[Peter Gross]

> An even more amusing situation can occur when a person sends mail to
> somebody to say he is going out of town, then sets up his own answering
> maching -- if the other person already had an answerer set up! The
> infinite loop can be avoided if automatic mail answerers are coded to keep
> track of who they have already sent to, and send no more than once to a
> given address.
>
> This is implemented in the (otherwise despicable) VMS mail system, and has
> saved a lot of trouble.

4.2 bsd comes with a program called "vacation" which does this (keep track
of who it has sent to). Most people probably don't know about it because
it is buried in the the sendmail directory. If you have a 4.2bsd source
license, the place to look is:
/usr/src/usr.lib/sendmail/aux

That directory contains both source and manual page for vacation.

(I plan to put it to the test shortly, as I leave for 4 weeks vacation.)
--
--peter gross
UUCP: {hplabs,seismo}!hao!pag
CSNET: p...@ncar.csnet
ARPA: pag%nc...@csnet-relay.arpa