Spam and sieve vacation

[Jorey Bump]

Janne Peltonen wrote:

> 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.

[snip]

> 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?

The risks are dependent on how effective your antispam measures are. If 
you find that your institution is still delivering a high amount of spam 
to user inboxes, it might be wise to continue the ban on autoreponders.

If you don't get much spam, sieve vacation is suitable. Providing a 
usable frontend for ordinary users is the real challenge.