Chad wrote:
Rather, can someone fix mailman so these sorts of things don't come through? Usually they don't...
Mailman discards posts with the header "Precedence: bulk", which is set by the classic UNIX autoresponder "vacation". However, there are many autoresponders which don't set any such header, or X-Mailer or anything else. Then, the best you can do is to set up regex-based filters to heuristically detect such mails. However, the configuration is list-specific and it would be quite a bit of mucking around to set up a filter for all lists.
Every time I post to mediawiki-announce, I get several autoreplies direct to me, despite Reply-To being set. I've rarely seen two emails with the same subject line:
* Bedankt voor je e-mail/Thanks for e-mailing (Re: [MediaWiki-announce] MediaWiki security update: 1.15.2) * Re: [MediaWiki-announce] MediaWiki security update: 1.15.2 * Abwesend: [MediaWiki-announce] MediaWiki security update: 1.15.2 * Your message has been rejected. * Abwesenheitsnotiz * Din sag er modtaget hos IT-ServiceDesk og er blevet tildelt ID ...
Those were the subject lines for the autoreplies to the last two announcements. If these autoreply scripts actually did respect Reply-To, then we'd see this sort of junk on the list a lot more often.
So filtering is not as trivial as you might think.
-- Tim Starling