prevent auto-responders from posting to forums?

[Kimberly Bogart]

This is a new invitation only listserve for a professional group of individuals (~150 once we get everyone signed up) across the US. We are trying to replace an email distribution list with the Nabble Forum. I am assuming that many of them will use an out of office auto reply at some point. Is there something that I can suggest to them to prevent this from happening again?

 

Are you perhaps working on an option for the administrator to ignore auto replies from the posts. Is there something I can do as an administrator (Sorry – I am new to this) to check the posts before they go live to prevent these messages from going out to everyone. When it happens (and this was only from 2 individuals) we quickly get 100+ emails in the matter of a few minutes, and contrary to popular opinion – I am not always at my desk J to catch it.

 

Thank you very much for your assistance in this!

 

Kimberly Bogart

GIS Specialist

 

Entergy Arkansas Inc.

Hydro Operations

141 W. County Line Rd.

Malvern, AR 72104

 

Office:  501.844.2116

Mobile:  [phone]

Fax:  [phone]

[hidden email]

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Hugo <Nabble> [via Nabble Support] [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2010 12:04 PM
To: Bogart, Kimberly
Subject: Re: prevent auto-responders from posting to forums?

 

Hi Kimberly, we investigated those "out of office" replies and they are difficult to handle. Emails of this type usually have headers that indicate they are an automated response, but those from your forum don't have anything to indicate this. This is probably because they were generated with Microsoft Exchange. We can't simply check the text "out of office" in subjects because this is fundamentally wrong (e.g., this won't work with other languages, etc.).

In short, if you see new emails like that, unsubscribe the user immediately and post a link to such messages on this support forum. If your forum suddenly gets flooded by emails like that, you can also contact us to run a script and delete them all. Thanks for your help.

Official Nabble Administrator - we never ask for passwords.

 

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[Hugo <Nabble>]

I actually forgot to ask you where this problem happened. Was it on the Arkansas GIS Users Forum?
If yes, then I think these emails came from the mailing list (gisusersforum) and not from forum subscriptions. I looked at that forum and there are no subscribers. Please confirm this or post a link to the forum where you had the problem. Please also let me know if you remember the name of the user who sent the "out of office" replies because I will try to search for those posts.

If those emails really came from the mailing list, then there is nothing Nabble can do because they are sent by the mailing list server, not our servers. After you replace the mailing list with our forum subscription, then we will probably have ways to block them.

[jasonray]

Hugo, here is an example of one that slipped through for us:

http://n2.nabble.com/Assertion-doc-and-code-sets-tp4745515p4764861.html

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Thanks, that message was removed from the topic, but I found it in the database. Unfortunately it doesn't have anything in the headers that could inform us that it is an auto-response. This seems to be a bad disadvantage of Microsoft Exchange and we can't do much about it. So, if you see more messages like this, you can either unsubscribe the author or remove the message (or both).

[jasonray]

Hugo, could I suggest that you allow a forum admin to define a pattern to prevent messages from posting?  That would allow me to exclude "out of office" on my forums without forcing nabble-at-large from implementing it that way.

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Hi Jason, sorry in the delay in getting back to you. We may implement your suggestion in the future, but I don't think "out of office" emails will bother you that often. You can let me know how often you get bothered by this problem and we will rethink the priority of this work.

[Kimberly Bogart]

Sorry for the delay in the response to this email. The out of office reply has spooked my users (an myself) but we are planning on making another push to migrate to this forum. So I am really hoping that it is fixed.

The forum where they occured is HPSIG - not the Arkansas GIS Users Forum. HPSIG is a "private" forum not a mailing list. The currently banned users where we had the back and forth emails generated are davidpaul_murray and Bill Zemke.

On a side note - what happened to "my starred places" and how do you login to Nabble from www.nabble.com - there is no option to do this anymore.

[Harvey]

jasonray wrote

I have our forums setup to allow for posting via email.

Jason... how did you do this? I would like to "undo" it.

[Kimberly Bogart]

It has happened again. In the course of an hour we have over 100 emails from two gentlemen with out of office replys destroying the listserve. Is there a way to fix this or create a new forum where this won't happen?

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Kimberly Bogart wrote

The forum where they occured is HPSIG - not the Arkansas GIS Users Forum. HPSIG is a "private" forum not a mailing list. The currently banned users where we had the back and forth emails generated are davidpaul_murray and Bill Zemke.

Instead of banning them, you should unsubscribe them. You can do this by clicking on "Options > Users > Manage subscribers".

Kimberly Bogart wrote

On a side note - what happened to "my starred places" and how do you login to Nabble from www.nabble.com - there is no option to do this anymore.

We had to change a few things about user accounts, see:
http://nabble-support.1.n2.nabble.com/Users-and-the-registration-process-tp5382964p5382964.html

So login can only be done when you visit a Nabble app. Shared login is gone, but this will bring a lot of advantages to the system.

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Those users probably use Microsoft Exchange mail server (you may confirm this with them), which doesn't set the emails as "machine generated" and thus bring problems to Nabble. So the first thing you can do is unsubscribe them when you see the problem in action (Options > Users > Manage subscribers). If you still have one "out of the office" message available in the forum, please post a link so that I can take a look and see if there is something that Nabble could do to prevent this problem.