From: wusel@hactar.hanse.de (Kai 'wusel' Siering)
Newsgroups: alt.sys.amiga.uucp
Subject: Re: Mail answering program wanted
Date: 24 Aug 92 13:42:35 GMT
Reply-To: "Kai 'wusel' Siering" <wusel@hactar.hanse.de>
Organization: Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, Sietland, BRD
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In article <heiner.00gx@amross.cpr.sub.org>,
	heiner@amross.cpr.sub.org (Heinrich Kordewiner) writes:
% In article <overlord.09m4@megalith.miami.fl.us> overlord@megalith.miami.fl.us (Carlos Amezaga) writes:
% > Quoted from <...unknown> by ralle@oberon.dinoco.de (Ralph Niere):
% > > [...]
% > > I'm looking for a program that answers my mail while I'm on vacation.
% > > It should send a reply to each incoming mail including a short message
% > > telling the sender of the original mail when I'll be back and so on.
% > > [...]
%
% > [ UUEcho-Solution deleted ]
% >
% >     As you can see, I join text file called UUECHO.  This is the
% > Original message the creater of the message sent me, except that the To:
% > and From: headers have been reversed. [...]
%
% There are few problems with this kind of automaticaly responding mail. First,
% Your answer will allways contain the full original mail. Funny, if someone
% sends You uuencoded megafiles? Next, there are possible mail-loops if two
% such vacation-responding-systems start talking to each other. Let's hope, You
% got a very bad link to Your mail-feed.  ;-)

     That's why  the  sender  of the vacation message should IMO *not*
be  the  same  as  the  receipient of the orginal message (e. g. for a
vacation  message  for  mailbox  `wusel',  `real-wusel'  (who hasn't a
vacation program installed =:->) could act as the sender) ...

% But it's not a big deal, to make such a daemon by yourself. In Dillons
% aliases-manual there is an example for setting up such a program:
%
% |    mail may be piped to a command, such as an automated vacation-response
% |    program:
% |
% |     dillon: \dillon, >uumail:archive, |vacation
%
% This vacation-prog has to do few things: Parse the mail-header from stdin and get
% "From:" and/or "Reply-To:"-Line, look if it is safe to reply (some kind of
% daemon, "postmaster"?), take some/few lines from the message-body and do a
% "sendmail" with these graped lines to the replyaddress.

     Oerks, no,  *please*  do  *not*  use `From:'/`Reply-To:'. Use the
adresse  in  `From_'  (the first line in the mail) and don't forget to
put  the sending system (after `remote from' in same line) before that
bang (if it is a pure bang path) ...

% I've written such a vacation-response-ARexx-daemon yesterday afternoon, when I
[...]
% I would have posted it to this group since it is only 150 lines ARexx. But: I
% don't knew any solution for bang-only-paths (Is there any possiblity to determin
% the use of bang or domainpaths? In my subdomain I get even flamed if I only
% *think* of bangs...) and there should be more security for checking against
% sending responses to daemons. What should be done with "Sender:"-only
% headerlines? Should I look in "UuLib:aliases" if there is a 'true' user in the
% "To:"-line? What's about checking against getting mail from mailinglists? How to
% prevent the daemon from sending mail to cruel&cryptic gateways, should there be
% even a look-up-dont-sent-table? Include all the header in the response or does
% it look more nice to give the response a (pseudo) human touch? Any suggestions?
% Maybe there even exists a much better prog in netland?

     Well, as  it's  vacation  time for me also, I wrote my version of
`autoreply'  one week ago; it takes the reply-address from the `From_'
line  (so in case of mailing-lists, only the list-maintainer gets this
reply   -   and   not   the   sender   as   it  would  happen  in  the
`From:'/`Reply-To:'-solution)  and makes sure the adress following the
`From_'  is  really  a  uucp-bang-path  (if  it's  not,  it  will  get
transformed  into  one)  before  putting  the `remote_from_system!' in
front of it. Unfortunately, all sendmail programs I know of (including
mine  =:-<) doesn't bother to check if the `From_' address is really a
bang  path  - they just put `remote_sys!' in front of it (which breaks
if   the   address   was   something  like  `host!user@relay.do.main':
`remote_sys!host!user@relay...' isn't the same  as `remote_sys!relay.-
do.main!host!user') ...

Regards,
			kai

-- _
_ // Kai 'wusel' Siering, Villa Straylight, Hamburg, BRD <wusel@hactar.hanse.de>
\X/    (Heute wieder im schoenen Sietland: <hactar.hanse.de!straylight!wusel>)

"Daylight savings time is a patchwork mess only a politician could love."
                    -- From the "Bugs" section of cnews-020592/libc/getabsdate.3