[Logcheck-devel] Bug#489172: logcheck: please add Auto-Submitted header field to mailouts

[Russ Allbery]

Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda at deb.at> writes:
> * Lee Maguire <lee-debian at hexkey.co.uk> [2008-07-03 19:49:58 CEST]:

>> Please add the header "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to mails
>> generated by logcheck.  This header should be supported by many email
>> autoresponders and should prevent the need to set up logcheck specific
>> rules for "vacation"-type autoresponders.
>
>  "should be supported" - how many do so already? It's a proposed
> standard, i.e. it's not one yet.

"Proposed Standard" in IETF terminology is as far as 90% of the IETF
standards ever get, including many protocols in very widespread use.

Stanford's autoresponder supports it, at least.

> Actually I'm not really aware of that header being out in the wild? What
> happened to the good old Precedence header?

The meaning of the Precedence header is horribly murky and no one can
agree on what keywords to use.  Auto-Submitted is a lot cleaner and tells
you what you want to know rather than some vague metric of importance.

>  I'm not really convinced about what the gain of adding that header
> will be. What tools have support for it already? What's the benefit of
> adding it (besides that it looks fishy as actual proper header without
> the X- prefix to me)?

It's a standard, so it gets an actual proper header name.  That should
make it *less* fishy.  :)

There's basically no drawback to adding it, and you might get a few more
autoresponders to not respond to the mail.  And it's the correct thing to
do according to the current mail standards.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>