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From: warren@ihnss.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Standard mail header field for mechanically generated mail?
Message-ID: <1694@ihnss.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 19-Sep-83 17:08:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihnss.1694
Posted: Mon Sep 19 17:08:41 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Sep-83 15:53:45 EDT
Organization: BTL Naperville, Il.
Lines: 22

Is there a standard way to distinguish mail sent from automatic
sources, such as vacation mail processors, mail daemon processes
that return undeliverable mail, etc., from human generated mail?
I ask this after some recent discussion on the problems of writing a
mail handler that replies for you while you are on vacation.  Such a
handler should ideally not reply to anything that is mechanically
generated (such as another copy of itself, or a mail item returned
from some other source), or looping may result.  (There is a
probably somewhat appocryphal story about the first vacation mail
handler at MIT, which supposedly took down the Arpanet when two of
them got into a duel forwarding messages at eachother).

My purpose would equally well be served by a header field tagging
sources that should not be sent mail.  If a standard convention for
either of these, I would like to use it.  If not, I think that it is
a reasonable idea to adopt one.

-- 

	Warren Montgomery
	ihnss!warren
	IH x2494