Re: comments: draft-moore-auto-email-response-04.txt

[Arnt Gulbrandsen <arnt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Markus Stumpf writes:
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 05:43:52PM +0100, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
> >  >  IMHO a personal responder (vacation) should send the message to the
> >  >From field.
> >
> >  Do that, and the document die as irate mailing-list posters complain 
> >  about having received vacation messages whenever they post to a 
> >  list.
>
> As outlined in the draft vaction programs should never answer to posts
> from a mailing list ;-)

Yep. IMO, in the best case, there'll be a five-year transition until 99% 
of responders are "good". Can't have too much pain during that 
transition.

> So add a list that lists the pro's and con's of each field. Just 
> because there are controversal opinions is not a reason to drop the 
> topic at all.

It is, IMHO. An RFC that draws too many flames is not an RFC that'll be 
implemented widely and well.

Feel free to suggest text changes/additions.

> >  Achieve agreement on what the rules should be?
>
> If there are rules there would be something a programmer of a vacation 
> type program could stick to.

And disagree visciously about. Recently, X-* fields were mentioned on 
this list. Apparently, people disagreed so viciously that RFC 2822 
finally came out without any mention of x-*.

Broken stuff won't go away. But please, let's have a document that won't 
be ignored because some parts are flame-worthy, or held up because it 
attempts to specify too much. Let's have something modest and good. 
It's always possible to supplement it with a later vacation 
specification.

> >  Inappropriate, IMO. Too much of a special case, and besides, you 
> >  don't want to ignore a whole category just like that.
>
> You mean something that makes 90% of all "responder" traffic at times 
> is an "inappropriate special case"? ;-)

Yes. Just like it would be an inappropriate special case to say 
"Content-type: antivirus-warning".

> The same could however be achieved with
>     Auto-Submitted: auto-generated; antivirus W32/Sobig-F
> and maybe antivirus vendors will take it up in a way like that but 
> then we'd have 30 different semi-standarized comment fields ;-)

That would be much better, but I'm still not quite persuaded. That seems 
to be turning auto-submitted towards being a hierarchical 
specification, which fits badly in its environment.

Perhaps the auto-submitted "parameter" could be elaborated a little, 
mentioning two optional parameters, "generator" and "type", and saying 
that "type" is "antivirus", "vacation", "new-ticket" or something else, 
and generator is a string describing the product.

  Auto-Submitted: auto-generated; type=antivirus; generator="sophos blah".

That would be very like e.g. content-type and content-disposition.

--Arnt