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Date: Sun, 02 Feb 1997 21:25:12 -0700
To: Stranger Bone <ben@narcissus.ml.org>,
        Cliff Addy <fbsdlist@revelstone.jvm.com>
From: Scott Halbert <thor@thuntek.net>
Subject: Re: mailbot wars
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
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At 07:11 PM 2/2/97 -0800, Stranger Bone wrote:
>On Sun, 2 Feb 1997, Cliff Addy wrote:
>
>> I was fiddling with creating a mail autoresponder and can't see how to
solve
>> a problem.  I was using the .forward mechanism to pipe email into a perl
>> script and autorespond to the sender.  It works fine, but what happens if I
>> receive email from a person running an autoresponder themselves?  Then my
>> mailbot emails a confirmation to them, their mailbot responds to me,
mine to
>> theirs, and all hell breaks loose. 
>> 
>> Is there any way to avoid this situation?  I thought of putting a
particular
>> string in the response subject, then look for it and don't respond to email
>> that contains it.  However, an autoresponder could respond back to me
with a
>> generic subject, then all hell breaks loose again. 
>
>I don't know if this would work, but:
>
>1) Have the perl script save the subject line and compare it with the last 
>   subject line it saw.
>
>2) If the two are the same, increment some counter by 1.
>
>3) If the counter reaches 5, notify you and stop autoresponding to 
>   messages with that subject until further notice (i.e. reset by hand).
>
>Obviously there are cases where this wouldn't work, but it might be a 
>good start.  Someone will probably have a better suggestion.
>
>> Any and all suggestions appreciated.  Well, maybe not *all* suggestions :)
>> 
>> Cliff

Another solution I've seen to this ('vacation' uses this) is to put
in your own header in the e-mail: 
	Precedence: bulk

And to never respond to mail with this header in it.  This has the
added benefit that you can keep from responding to majordomo mailing
lists or such (which really irritates the other list members).

Now, this might now work too well if other mailbots don't obey this
same rule, but many do.  You might need more features to really
block some mailbots.

---Scott Halbert
Thunder Network Technologies, Inc.

> Ben
>
>The views expressed above are not those of the Worker's Compensation 
>Board of Queensland, Australia.
>
>
>
>