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Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

eh, the big problem is people on mailing lists. Everyone hates out of office emails in mailing lists.

Vacation messages, when emailing individuals? Yeah, in the technical sphere, they are generally considered kinda rude. In the business sphere, the opposite. So yeah, here on hn, with a foot in both camps, eh, just make sure you don't vacation message a mailing list.

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That's easy to say, but hard to actually do. As much as I hate spamming mailing lists, it's not like I'm going to spend two days carefully specifying answering rules for every autoreply message target in my Outlook that I must use at work. So, the burden of doing that properly is on Microsoft or company IT to make sure who will get the auto reply, while all user can and has to do is to tick a check box and type an actual message.

Is it really hard to do? Wouldn't it be enough to have the server always set the right MIME headers for messages from a mailing list? And then have the vacation mailer not send any out of office replies to mails from mailing lists? This sounds like a problem with a technical solution.

From the Sieve vacation RFC https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5230#page-8

   Implementations SHOULD NOT respond to any message that contains a
   "List-Id" [RFC2919], "List-Help", "List-Subscribe", "List-
   Unsubscribe", "List-Post", "List-Owner", or "List-Archive" [RFC2369]
   header field.

If your Exchange server is 2007SP1 and up, you can specify your OOF to only send to external users who are on your contacts list. That should resolve the mailing list spamming issue here.

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