Re: CalMail Vacation Messages

On Jan 28, "Mike Friedman" wrote:

> I wonder if CalMail users are supposed to be aware of the $SUBJECT
> variable in a vacation message, whose purpose is to preserve the subject
> text of the original incoming mail.
>
> As one who is responsible for processes (SNS and CalNet) that initiate
> many automated messages to folks with CalMail addresses, I'm somewhat
> perturbed at how many vacation messages just contain fixed text in their
> subject lines. Which often makes it impossible to tell which mail they're
> replying to. It's particularly annoying when the vacation reply simply
> tells us to use a new address; it's not always easy to know where and how
> to make such a change, if we don't know what the reply is referring to.
>
> In addition, our (SNS) incident tracking system keeps track of tickets
> based on a special tag in the subject line. When the vacation reply comes
> back for one of our notices, if the subject line doesn't contain the tag,
> a new ticket is generated in our system. And there's no way to link it to
> the original notice, since the subject line has not been preserved. In
> some cases, we may end up blocking (compromised or infected) hosts because
> we found it difficult to follow up with the user (sysadmin), not knowing
> which problem was at issue.

Doesn't the traditional unix vacation program only send out one "I'm on
vacation!" per person? How does calmail's work? Can it be changed so
that it sends only one message per person with, let's say, a week timeout?
My guess is that it's on a daily timeout.

I think it'd be good to have the default vacation message include the
$SUBJECT (if $SUBJECT exists.) Does anybody think people would actually
object?

Mike

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Received on Fri Jan 28 15:15:45 2005