vacation programs

[Chris St. Pierre]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007, Gene Rackow wrote:

> I know the subject of vacation programs have come up a few
> times in the past.  I'm curious what people may be using
> to provide a reasonable auto-response.
>
> The problem that I have seen popping up is the spammers
> are sending mail directly to the users address.  The From
> line is forged.  The spam is staying under the radar on
> the various anti-spam measures in place so it gets
> delivered to the user as a real message.  The vacation
> program then responds to this junk mail.
>
> In a few cases the person at the other end of the forged
> address reports the vacation message as spam to some RBL
> site.  The RBL site gives the option to respond that
> this is, or isn't real, and wants us to take action.  If
> we don't respond to them, they add our site to the
> blacklist.
>
> So far it's been managable, but I do see that things
> are going to need to change before long.
>
> My current vacation program is based on the Unix vacation
> rules.  Only respond to mail that you are listed on the
> To: or cc: lines.  No response to mailing lists, precedence:
> bulk or junk, some black-listed addresses, etc.

We use Sieve to do vacation responses after spam filtering.  With the
amount of sender spoofing going on these days, responding (or
forwarding, for that matter) before filtering will cause problems for
you.

Chris St. Pierre
Unix Systems Administrator
Nebraska Wesleyan University
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