[H-GEN] Email auto-forward and auto-respond utility wanted

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Wed Apr 14 07:00:52 EDT 2004


On 2004-04-14, Michael Anthon wrote:

> How about this?  http://horde.org/vacation/

Here's a snippet from that page:

    Vacation is a Horde module for managing user e-mail
    "vacation notices" or "auto-responders." It works via a
    local <i>vacation</i> program which must be installed and
    functioning on the server. It supports vacation programs
    using the .forward-style forwarding mechanism supported by
    several popular mailers [...]

This certainly sounds as though it's just a nice front end to
the nasty old vacation program -- and, as I explained earlier,
you really don't want to go near these things unless you have
already found some miraculous method for stopping spam and
viruses from hitting your users' inboxes, as the vacation
programs typically have a really nasty habit of attempting to
reply to the forged addresses that are commonly found attached
to such email.

Until somebody gets around to developing a vacation program that
only replies to the people that you write to or that actually
verifies the validity of the sender addresses (by some algorithm
that has yet to be developed), the right answer is "don't use
vacation programs".

A simpler solution would be to write a tool that goes through a
user's address book and spams all their normal correspondents
with an "I'm going away" message.  Oops, we don't want to spam
people.  And maybe we don't want to send this to people who
might read it as "this would be a good time to burgle my house".

Cheers, Greg




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