Subject: How to handle subscribers with autoresponders

From: Adam Roach <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 17:18:05 -0500

I'm seeing an increasing trend on IETF mailing lists regarding the use 
of antisocial auto-responders.

For most mailing lists, every message I send to the list is greeted with 
a response directly to me indicating that one or more of the various 
subscribers are out of the office and won't see my mail until, say, 
sometime next week.

In some less common cases, I'm seeing such responses spammed directly to 
the list (cf. 
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/xcon/current/msg00636.html). Since 
the sender is necessarily also a subscriber, mailman lets these messages 
through.

And, of course, yet others send such responses to the 
"[email-masked]" address, which generates a message back to the 
list owner indicating that mailman couldn't parse the out-of-office 
response as a known bounce format.

Recently, though, I've been seeing automatic responses to messages sent 
to a mailing list that require that sender to take an action -- such as 
clicking on a web page link -- to release the sent message from a 
quarantine at the recipient's end. I'm not going into the merits and 
demerits of such a system here, but it should be obvious that this 
approach doesn't scale, and the endgame is completely unusable mailing 
lists.

As far as I know, there is no formal policy about how such trouble 
subscribers should be handled. I propose adding language to 
http://www.ietf.org/maillist.html or a page linked from there to address 
this specific case.

In particular, I propose the following policy:

    Mailing list subscribers who enable an auto-responder in such a way
    that it causes messages to be sent in response to postings to an
    IETF mailing list, regardless of the recipient(s) of the
    auto-response, will be removed as subscribers from the mailing list
    and be sent a brief note informing them that such action has
    occurred and why.

Thoughts?

/a

---

From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 16:32:01 -0700

Unsubscribe them with notice.

>   and be sent a brief note informing them that such action has

And if the brief note bounces?  I suggest this be reworded
slight differently.
        s/and..../and a brief message will be sent to the address
        in attempt to give notice of the removal./

Kurt

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 19:13:47 -0700

Hi -

> From: "Kurt D. Zeilenga" <[email-masked]>
> To: "Adam Roach" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 4:32 PM
> Subject: Re: How to handle subscribers with autoresponders
>

>         in attempt to give notice of the removal./
...

I think it would be better to give the mailing list admin / working group chair
a little more leeway in deciding whether to drop someone.  I suggest
replacing "will be removed...be sent" with "may, at the discretion of
the mailing list administrator, be removed from the mailing list and sent".
*Most* of the autoresponses I've encountered on the lists I manage
have not been sufficiently obnoxious or persistent to merit extreme action.

There's also the *really* obnoxious case of the autoresponders that
don't provide any good clue about which subscriber they're responding
on behalf of.  The one that annoys me the most is one saying that
the subscriber's email address has been changed due to spam, but
doesn't say what the old or the new addresses are, and doesn't preserve
enough of the original message to make detective work productive.

Randy

---

From: Adam Roach <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 21:41:28 -0500

Randy Presuhn wrote:

>I think it would be better to give the mailing list admin / working group chair a little more leeway in deciding whether to drop someone.  I suggest

I understand that sentiment. The problem, however, is that the pain is 
felt by the entire working group in many cases. There are, for example, 
certain mailing lists to which I've actually become hesitant to send 
messages because I know I'll be punished by half-a-dozen Outlook-style 
"out of office" notices.

/a

---

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 20:43:11 -0700

Hi -

> From: "Adam Roach" <[email-masked]>
> To: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 7:41 PM
...
...

In your example, the pain is *not* felt by the entire working group.
Rather, the individual poster gets these obnoxious messages.
In this case, I'd strongly suggest forwarding them to the mailing
list administrator, who would otherwise probably be completely
unaware that there was a problem.

I *really* do not want to be *required* to drop someone from a WG
mailing list.  The WG chair or mailing list admin is in a good
position to judge whether the offending traffic really merits such an
extreme sanction.

RAndy

---

From: Jeffrey Haas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 08:24:00 -0400

> of antisocial auto-responders.

As we are all aware, this isn't a new problem or trend.  However, I
do have the following question:

Why are the mailing lists "Precedence: list" rather than "Precedence: bulk"?

Admittedly, the former is more descriptive but the latter is more
recognized by programs such as "vacation".  I would be curious if
simply changing the list precedence would be sufficient to get rid
of much of this problem.

-- 
Jeff Haas 
NextHop Technologies