Spam and sieve vacation

[Janne Peltonen]

Hi!

The policy in our university has long been to discourage using auto
responders (two of the main reasons being, we don't want to end up
forwarding spam to innocent third parties, and neither want to
automatically confirm to a spammer that an address works - auto-answers
to lists and other traditional pitfalls are more easy to avoid).  So we
don't support sieve vacation, either.

Now I heard the people at MIT have reversed their policy on auto
responders abt a year ago (haven't confirmed this, though). Apparently
they're using sieve 07 (not confirmed this, either), which contains
sieve-vacation-07, which appears to be more or less identical to
sieve-vacation-04, which is implemented by Cyrus 2.3.x. And vacation-04
appears to implement the recommendations for auto responders rfc
(rfc3834).

Now I'd like to ask the people on this list about their experiences
using the sieve vacation module. The risks of automatically
responding to spam / automatically forwarding spam / ending up in
sorceror's apprentice mode / ending up having our mail servers
blacklisted as spam relays - would they be acceptably low?

(It seems to me that MIT is at a lesser risk of ending up on permanent
blacklists than a relatively unknown university from a remote
country...)

Thanks,


--Janne Peltonen
imap admin
Univ. of Helsinki
-- 
Janne Peltonen <janne.peltonen at helsinki.fi>