Path: utzoo!dptcdc!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!ethz!ethz-inf!wyle
From: wyle@inf.ethz.ch (Mitchell Wyle)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Return receipts vs. Delivery receipts
Message-ID: <170@inf.ethz.ch>
Date: 17 Apr 89 16:11:46 GMT
References: <13-Apr-89.151831@192.41.214.2> <Apr.13.18.15.59.1989.20117@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: wyle@lavi.UUCP (Mitchell Wyle)
Organization: Departement fuer Informatik, ETH Zuerich
Lines: 44

In article <Apr.13.18.15.59.1989.20117@topaz.rutgers.edu> 
msmith@topaz.rutgers.edu (Mark Robert Smith) writes:
>We'd like to be able to delete the message and send a message back to the
>sender saying "This mail was received and refused by the addressee",
>meaning that we got it but never read it, and sent it back.

Using Dave Taylor's filter(l) program which comes with elm, or my
MailFilter program, you *CAN* do exactly that.

With MailFilter, you create a new directory (doesn't matter what it's
called) in the MailFilter installation directory;  you then put a
regular expression in a file called "pattern" and a simple script in a
file called "action."  In  this case, the action could be something
simple like:

#!/bin/sh
badguy=msmith@topaz.rutgers.edu
{
  echo "This mail was received and refused by the addressee:"
  echo ""
  cat 
} | mail $badguy

and the pattern could be something like "msmith@topaz|gbush@whitehouse"

I actually used stuff like this "bouncer" program for a while because a
certain European standard for message interchange (which shall remain
unnamed to protect the guilty) sends a lot of garbage mail.  I recently
turned the bouncer off, and use a program which simply, silently
deletes the messages before I see them.

It's better not to send inflamatory mail, and such auto-replies could
be considered flames themselves.  In my case, the auto-replies were
indeed construed as flames, so I turned them off.  But two years later,
the "*STANDARD*" champions actually violated their own standard to
shut-up the obnoxious messages it produces.  I hadn't actually seen any
of them for a while, but apparently others had...  Such obnoxious
automatically-generated messages can also cause mailer loops; think
about what happens if messages like that get sent to an archive-server,
and if your standard does not include a hop-count...
-- 
-Mitchell F. Wyle                         wyle@ethz.uucp
Institut fuer Informationssysteme         wyle@inf.ethz.ch
ETH Zentrum / 8092 Zurich, Switzerland    +41 1 256 5237