If you've been directed to this page, it is because you sent an autoreply in response to a list message. Consider yourself warned - continued ignorance on your part is no excuse. You should read this entire page, and gain an understanding of the significance of blithely sending autoreply messages to all your inbound email. An additional notification may have also been addressed to your system administrator and (as appropriate) the administrator of the list on which your autoreply was generated through.

You might also read up on stupid things newbies do, of which sending autoreplies indiscriminatley in response to mailing list messages is so common, it deserves it's own coverage right here.

People who believe email should be a respected communications medium might consider reading this. People who could give a crap about email for communications should proceed to the counseling phone on the Golden Gate bridge, and await further directions - if you don't get a call within 15 minutes, go ahead and jump. Out of respect for others, don't do this during commute hours.

Let's cut to the chase here: it is REALLY bad form to use autoreplies to list mail. Autoreplies in general are annoying, but on mailing lists, they're just plain wrong.

For everyone who thinks autoreplies are cool, some rules to live by:

Rule #1: Autoreplies are not cool and most people don't care if you're out of the office, smoking a joint, or shooting heroin. If they REALLY need to get in touch, they should be able to call your voicemail (I mean, if they're really someone you're in contact with, they'll know your number, right?), where you can have a message that only people actually calling YOU will receive.

Rule #2: Never, ever, autoreply to a message which doesn't have YOUR address in the TO: field. That generally includes mailing lists, but also things on which you are CC'd, or otherwise BCC'd on. Simply put, if you're not important enough to be addressed on the TO: line, nobody cares about you or where you are for the next 18 months.

Rule #3: Never, ever, autoreply to a message which comes from a mailing list. If you actively filter your mailing list traffic before passing messages to your autoreply mechanism, you'll weed out a great many of these unnecessary autoreplies you might otherwise foolishly send. Mailing lists typically resend messages to their subscribers using a BCC mechanism, thus the TO: field is usually the mailing list address (though not always, depending on how the original sender of the message addressed it) -- in most cases, there is a Sender:, Resent-By:, Mailing-List: or similar header which will handily identify the list which the message is coming through, and the mere presence of that should be enough to signify that you should NOT send an autoreply to that message. This isn't to say that if you do this, you can ignore Rule #2, but if you screw something up, this will reduce the impact of your fsckup. If you're subscribed to any of a number of one-way notification lists (lists which often have your address listed in the TO:, but are still lists nonetheless - and don't care if you're on vacation or not), you'll innundate those listadmins with mail which is meaningless to them. Autoreplying to list posts (esp. if you're doing it on EVERY list post), will often result in the offender being blacklisted by multiple sites (to stop their incessant autoreplying to every post) and/or summary unsubscribing from the list in question (whether by the listadmin, or forged by one or more of the very annoyed list users). Another common characteristic of mailing lists is the presence of a Precedence: header containing "list", "bulk", or even "junk". If the message contains this, don't autoreply to it.

If you consistently adhere to rules #2 and #3, the number of people you piss off will be dramatically reduced, and you'll keep your foot (or other body part) out of your mouth for 99.5% of the autoreplies which you send out, which is a far cry better than having your foot (or other body part) in your mouth 100% of the time.

Rule #4: DO NOT autoreply to an address which you have ALREADY sent an autoreply to. If your email software doesn't have the capability to distinguish addresses which it has already replied to (as in, these people have already been notified, whether they needed to be or not, and continued autoreplies are unwarranted), then DO NOT use the autoreply feature in that software. Some people can overlook a single autoreply. Bunches of them get really fsking annoying, especially if you're going to be gone for a while.

Rule #5: Don't be a dip and autoreply to MAILER-DAEMON messages, which will result when someone gets peeved at you and decides they can do without EVER hearing from you again, but then discovers that you're more than happy to attempt to create a mail loop in response to the bounces you get trying to autoreply. This is usually followed by a reaction such as those described in Rule #10 below.

Rule #6: DO NOT set up an autoreply 15 milliseconds before you step out the door on your long awaited world tour. Set it up earlier in the day, and check your mail several times afterwards. This does a few things for you -- it allows you at least some time to realize that you fscked up bigtime so you can fix it before you really do leave, and it also lets some people know that you'll be gone BEFORE you're unreachable, in case there's something they desperatley need to communicate to you.

Rule #7: Retain some shred of the original subject line, so that the person to whom you are autoreplying has SOME clue as to where the fsck you're coming from (especially important for those people who insist on autoreplying to messages in violation of rules #2 and #3 above). It is a further waste of the recipient's time if they don't know what you're autoreplying to. This can be further compounded if you have multiple email addresses (including role-based addresses), and the autoreply is sent by a different discreet address than the address to which the original message was addressed to (keeping in mind Rule #2 which stipulates that the sender still may have no fsking idea who you are).

Rule #8: If you MUST autoreply, check YOUR message for accuracy, and always include contact information for someone to contact if you cannot be reached - this includes their name, phone number (WITH areacode, and extension as appropriate - if you give just an extension, you're being a moron, since the recipient may not have your main number), and email address. Be sure this person either has the key to your office and password to your computer, or at least the authority to take it and throw it out the window or beat on it with a 20 pound sledgehammer (which I'll gladly loan to them). If you asked someone in your IT department how to do autoreplies, please include their number, with some clarifying statement like "Bill showed me how to do autoreplies, you may reach him at...", so that the joy may be shared.

Rule #9: Pay attention when people remind you that autoreplies are annoying. Try not to repeat the offence. This means YOU.

Rule #10: If you ignore a substantial number of the above rules, pray you don't annoy someone that sends you a message forged to be from yourself, causing a mail loop in your braindead software that can't comprehend that it has already sent an autoreply to that person. Similarly, pray that they don't obtain your sysadm's email address and forge an message from them in response to each message you autoreply to them from a mailing list, so that each such autoreply sends an annoying reminder to your IT personnel giving them incentive to seek out your computer and disable the autoreply feature, if not simply disable your account entirely.

Rule #11: If you cause a mail loop on a mailing list (where you send an autoreply to the list address - and subsequently send an autoreply to THAT message which is also delivered to you, which in turn you send ANOTHER autoreply to...), you will raise not only the ire of the listadmin, but will probably piss off several technically savvy listmembers who would be more than happy to set you up with several private mail loops which may very well crash your company mail server. When your IT person finishes dealing with the crashed server and explaining the problem to your boss and your bosses boss, they'll probably be giving you a call -- even if you're still on vacation. If you were idiot enough to set up an autoreply which permitted a mail loop to occur, you deserve anything annoying that is coming your way.

Rule #12: While including the original subject for context is a good idea, including the entire original message is stupid. Especially when those messages get large. If someone (legitimatley) sends you a detailed message, or a message with an attachment, they don't need to recieve a copy of it as part of your message telling them how you'll get around to reading it next month. If a mailing list relays a large message (or a "digest") to you, the listadmin or message author certainly doesn't need to receive a copy of it when you send out an autoreply stating that you're an idiot.

If you can follow these simple rules, the number of unwarranted "I'm out of the office" autoreplies you send out will decrease dramatically, which in turn will make the world a better place to be. And you won't piss off as many technically savvy people that might want to take the short route to fixing the problem.

Thank you for your careful consideration of this matter.

Other autoreply gems:

Some rocket scientists subscribe to a mailing list, using an account which has an auto-reply which sends out marketing crap. So, for each message sent to the mailing list, the author of the list message receives the marketing drivel from this moron who has set up their autoreply. This legally constitutes SPAM, and will be treated as such. Most listadmins will be more than happy to ban you from their list, your hosting ISP may cancel your account with them, and your domain may be added to an RBL (Realtime Blackhole List), which can make it difficult for you to conduct legitimate business (if you have any).

Some of these same morons also have the gall to cull addresses from all the mail which they've ever recieved (remember, mailing list messages were not sent by the author TO the recipient, but rather TO the list), and use them to send out notifications - either outright commercial SPAM, or "I'm moving or changing employers" type address change notices. Don't be a moron. People don't like morons.

I've seen autoreplies indicating that people will be gone for periods of time up to ELEVEN MONTHS - yet these idiots can't bother to unsubscribe from mailing lists they've elected to subscribe to. Other times, I've seen autoreplies that indicate that someone will reply when they get back from their vacation, sabbatical, or maternity leave -- and then in some fit of karmic justice, they never return (having either quit or been laid off before returning), and the company doesn't resolve their email account for months afterward.

This idiocy sometimes extends to the IT department of the company in question, because on some occasions (and again, still primarily on mailing lists, not in direct communication), the morons running the IT department at some company have chosen to autoreply with text stating that "so-and-so is no longer with >company<". Cluetime: the proper thing to do if an email address is no longer valid is to simply BOUNCE the message. If your MTA (Mail Transfer Agent -- the mail server software) is standards compliant, that means the bounce goes to the "sender" or Errors-To address (which isn't inherently the "From:" address -- in the case of mailing list messages, the list "owner" is the sender), and if it is a standard format bounce, the list can manage removal of the address. If it goes to an individual (in the case of a direct mailing from the message author), that person should be able to infer that the address is no longer valid, and can easily choose to contact the company (they probably have the telephone number if they were doing BUSINESS with your company) to follow up. It is inappropriate to BOUNCE a message using the no-longer-valid recipient address as the From: address -- a standard MTA bounce is usually mailed from "MAILER-DAEMON" - anyone who has been on the internet for longer than 20 minutes has probably seen such a bounce at least once in their life. IT personnel have no excuse for setting up such nonstandard autoreplies.

When IT departments do this, they manage to circumvent the automatic delivery failure handling which would have allowed the mailing list to take action and delete the no longer valid address. This is further complicated by the fact that the notification often DOES NOT CONTAIN or the same address to which the original message was addressed (coming "From:" it isn't the standard) - thus an automated mail process has no hope whatsoever in handing the bad address.

As mentioned above, there are standards for where a bounce-type message should be sent in response to an inbound message. Many of these lame-brained autoreplies simply get sent to the From: address, rather than the RFC-821 defined Reply-To:, Errors-To:, or Return-Path addresses, any of which should have been used if your mail system were the slightest bit standards compliant.

Please think about this for a moment: had this been a mailing list message, you would have delivered your autoreply to the person who had sent a message to the mailing list, and who isn't mailing YOUR person, AND doesn't know what the original address the list redelivered the message to (so they could, for instance, forge an unsubscribe on their behalf). The list administrator and/or automatic error processor would not be receiving the notification (which lacks all the identifiers of a bounce anyway), and similarly wouldn't be able to handle it even if you did properly address the autoreply. I mention this because an alarming number of companies operate non standards-compliant mail servers that do pretty much this very thing (though to their credit, they're usually sending real bounces, just not following proper addressing rules). Coincidentally, it seems the greatest trouble comes from windows-based mail servers (MS Exchange, Lotus Notes, and a plethora of unnamed cheapware mail packages for Windows).

If you want to provide forwarding contact information, it is possible to configure a good MTA (such as sendmail, a package typically used on *nix hosts) to bounce the address in the conventional fashion while at the same time providing further contact details within the error message, in case there is a human reader. This is a trivial thing to do in sendmail.

Some organizations do stupid things, such as using an individual address for official contact addresses (domain registrations and netblock delegations for instance), and when that individual no longer works for their company, they either bounce, send autoreplies. The appropriate thing to do in these instances is to review your official contact addresses and consider setting up mail aliases ("dnsadmin@yourdomain.com" is published, but your mail server ACTUALLY delivers this to "joebob@yourdomain.com" who is the person who acts in the capacity of the dns administrator).