An organization that I’m involved in recently set up a mailing list. It’s a nice way to communicate with the other board members.
However, one of the board members decided to go on vacation this week and turned on his e-mail autoreply noting that “I am on vacation on June 17 & 18. I will reply to your message upon my return.”
Unfortunately, the mailing list is set up that when it sends something out, the return address is the broadcast address of the mailing list. What this means is that every time this guy’s e-mail autoreplies, it sends out the autoreply to the whole damn mailing list, including himself. As he is on vacation, when he gets his copy of his own autoreply, his mail server autoreplies to the whole list, setting the process off once again.
What this means is that every five minutes, my computer sounds the bing-bong tone it does when I have mail, and I find 3 or 4 copies of his autoreply message waiting for me to delete.
I first found out about this when I logged on this evening and found about 80 of the autoreplies in my in box. This didn’t really piss me off too much, because I’ve gotten caught in the same kind of autoreply loops.
What really fucking grabs my gonads is that another numnut on the list just posted, starting the same damn autoreply cycle over again! So I now get another 3 messages every five minutes.
At least no one has posted a “don’t post anymore because we’ll get swamped with autoreplies” message.
Yeah, I did that, but it still goes bing-bong every five minutes. The only difference is that they go straight into the delete bin, from which I have to clean them out anyway.
And for the love of God, make sure he takes it off when he gets back. I’ve dealt with sending an email to someone who I’ve seen walking around the office that very day, and getting a cheery “I’m on vacation” email in return.
Not a huge problem, granted, and easily solveable, but it still happens occasionally and bugs me.
I set up an out of office reply for any planned absence of 1 day or greater. It’s not that I’m so important, but that it’s a convenience - it keeps people from wondering why I haven’t replied to their e-mail if I don’t have access from where I am. I also change my voice mail message for any planned absence.
But I know that with outlook, you can set up rules that will keep the auto reply from being sent to certain people/addresses when you’re out.
GHOD, that is a horrible thing. I was one of the folks that got “signed up” for that raraavis spam newsletter that hit a bunch of folks from the boards, that had several autoresponders on the list. That’s even worse, to be caught in an autoreply feedback loop for something you didn’t even sign up for in the first place! Auuugggghhhhh!!!
A small company asked me to wire them up and so I dedicated a fairly beefy system to act as their webproxy and email server ans stuck it on a nice pipe. (About 25 users so I figured it should handle their piddling traffic)
A couple of weeks later I get a call from the ISP asking “whats up with all the traffic guy ?” and then the company call and tell me they cant get email , have no webaccess and the system keeps crashing.
Narrgh!
Turns out that Mr Pillock had put an autoforward on his account so that he could have a redirect of all his mail . Fair 'nuff but he misspelled the account name he wanted the mail sent to. So the mails are being sent to a nonexistent account and prompt the remote system to send back an “Undeliverable” which also gets forwarded which also gets bounced which also gets forwarded which also gets bounced…faster and faster and faster. On top of which he also has the rule set to sent each new inbound email an “out of office” message , but the domain he is sending to assigns each individual “undeliverable” message a numerically different account to use. So all of the inbound "undeliverable"s are getting an out of office reply …which …you guessed it …are bounced because the account sending them is no longer accepting calls .
>68,000 mails in the space of 3 hours.
Fun Fun Fun
These guys should be made to return from their field trips and take a spanking in front of their office chums
I am very skeptical that vacation messages are a Good Thing. I can think of a VERY SMALL number of people who are in a situation where people get vacation messges from them and think “Oh, THANK GOD I got a vacation message, or I’d have been SCREWED!” whereas the vast majority of people get a vacation message and think, “Jesus, vacation messages are annoying.”
Send a vacation message to MY mailing list, and you will find yourself booted from the list. I’ll let you back, of course, when you get back, but only if you agree to one of the following three options: 1) Do not to set up vacation messages in the future, or 2) Set them up so they don’t reply to mailing list messages, or 3) unsubscribe from my mailing lists while you’re away.
We had a guy leave for 3 weeks and was unfamiliar with the “vacation” option so he set up his own rule whereby any message was replied to with his vacation message; in addition any secondary addressee’s were also replied to (cc’s). We have several group addressees which we all use. You can imagine what happened. The Admin finally just disabled his account to keep from inundating us (and everyone else) with ‘vacation messages’.
:smack:
Any software that sends more than one vacation autoreply message per customer is poorly designed. Better ones simply keep a list – no fuss, no muss, and if Mr. Important wants to let everyone know he’s at a two-hour lunch, no mail servers need be sacrificed.
Geobabe, I had no idea that the Raravis band crap I was getting was through the SDMB. I had just assumed it was a Klez related snafu. If Raraavis ever comes to town, I’ll be the guy hucking rotten fruit at him.
A whole bunch of people from the boards got the raraavis crap, though it was never determined how they got our emails. There were a bunch of threads on it a while back if you feel like searching for them.
The e-mail client we have at the office (Lotus Notes) sends one out of office message to any recipient, and keeps the list for me. Which is nice. But something similar happened to me once (fortunately, I was the only one affected by it).
I used to be able to set up an agent to forward my Lotus Notes e-mail home on my telecommute days - which meant I didn’t have to dial up to the network here to get my e-mail, I could use the broadband at home. Which was great. One time, though, I came back into work the next day and had FIVE HUNDRED bounce-back messages. What happened was this: I had sent a message to our entire group (about 60 people) - actually, I sent the message to myself, and CC’d everyone else to avoid this - one person replied to the message with Reply to All. Lotus Notes attempted to send that one to my home e-mail, but the firewall said “uh-uh! This looks like you’re forwarding a chain letter!” and sent it back to me. Lotus Notes attempted to send their rejection home, and the firewall said “uh-uh! This looks like a chain letter, too!” Five hundred times this happened. Each message got longer, and longer, because both Lotus Notes and the firewall attached what came before.
Took me half an hour to delete them all. Now, when I send out messages to the whole group, I BCC everyone, even though we can no longer set up forwarding agents.
And I didn’t know I was getting Raraavis from here, either. Well, that’s one mystery solved.