Re: Automatic Out of Office Notices create issues

Posted by Coleen_Astalos on Apr 08, 2014; 2:32am
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Automatic-Out-of-Office-Notices-create-issues-tp7589455p7589996.html

Yes, I'd be happy to.  

First of all, my forum has two modifications that may impact this:
1) instant_html/instant_text are set up to send the reply to an email to the list address instead of the author (actually that may be standard Nabble - can't remember)
2) should_get_instant_email is modified to send a copy of an email post back to the author as well as the entire list   But I think this problem would exist even without that change - particularly in the situation where a member has subscribed to receive emails for a particular topic they started (they'd get a copy of any reply they also make)

So here is what happen:
1) User A sets up an Autoresponder in their email program because they are going out of town to let anyone that emails them to know they are out of town.
2) Any user posts to the forum under a topic/category that User A is subscribed to.
3) User A's email program gets that instant subscription email and the autoresponder replies to the email (which goes back to the forum) saying the person is out of town.  Since the reply went back to the forum, it is distributed to all subscribers, which includes User A.
4) So now User A gets the email that says "User A" is out of town and again the autoresponder once again replies to the email back to the forum saying the person is out of town, which again gets distributed to all subscribers, including User A.  
5) This process continued in an infinite loop until we remove User A's subscription to stop it.

It is my understanding that autoresponders use specific settings in the message headers to know if it should reply to a message.   If it sees the headers indicating it was from a mailing list, then it won't issue the "Out of Office" reply.  But since Nabble hasn't set these headers, the autoresponder assumes it's just a normal person that has emailed them and issues the "Out of office" reply email.  

Here is a the information I provided in the original support request about what I think needs to be done to correct this problem:

Coleen Astalos; wrote

I've done some research and the problem seems to be that Nabble doesn't set the header precedence tag in the email to indicate the email is from a mailing list:
precedence: bulk
(Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6378773/correct-email-headers-for-delivering-mailing-list-mail)
See the bottom of the first answer which states:

Also, you should add a header

precedence: bulk

which for example tells intelligent out-of-office implementations not to send ooo replies to the list.

Let me know if you need any more info.
Coleen