Controlling where "out of office" replies are sent

Question

How do mail servers decide when and where to send "out of office"-type autoreplies?

It seems this is mail server dependent, so some will use a reply-to: address, others the From: and perhaps the Sender: address. Some servers (or all?) seem to care about the Precedence: field and will not send out of office replies at all on Precedence:bulk (or maybe precedence:list?). The return-path seems to be used for more severe types of bounces, but maybe it's used as well?

What I want is to achieve (this time) is to minimize the number of response e-mails that go to the from: address. I don't mind getting them at the reply-to address.

I've been looking for some sort of reference or best practices - any references or suggestions? I 've looked at some relevant RFCs (RFC2822, RFC3834) but I'm looking for how things are actually handled.

Answer 1

Here are a few thoughts:

• do not send more than one reply per day and recipient (flood protection)
• don't reply to anything that looks "automated" (bulk, spam, mailing lists, ...).
• the reply should set "Auto-Submitted: auto-replied' and 'Precedence: bulk' headers

have a look at this example to see possible header and senderpatterns to detect automated senders: https://github.com/gryphius/fuglu/blob/master/fuglu/src/fuglu/plugins/vacation.py

This implementation only sends to the envelope sender address(Return-Path), In my opinion, out-of-office is basically the same as a "your message is deferred" error and should therefore go to the bounce address. But I rarely see Reply-To Headers in non-bulk anyway,