[rt-users] blocking correspondence labeled "Precedence: bulk"

[Mike Friedman]

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On Thu, 28 Sep 2006 at 14:13 (-0400), Jesse Vincent wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 08:10:53PM +0200, Leif Nixon wrote:
>> "Precedence: bulk" indicates that the e-mail is either from a mailing 
>> list or somehow autogenerated (like an autoreply). It is almost always 
>> a good idea to filter those out from any automated e-mail handling, so 
>> yes, do go ahead.
>
> There's a very important nuance here.  Replying to them is bad. Dropping 
> them on the floor is even worse.  Just because mail has been proxied by 
> an automated system doesn't mean it's junk.

We ran into this problem a few weeks ago.  One of our RT systems is 
addressed via a publicly advertised campus email address that had been 
implemented as a majordomo list(*).  Mail generated by such lists uses 
'Precedence: bulk' headers, so AutoReplies weren't being sent back to the 
Requestors.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on, especially since 
AutoReply had been working before when a different RT mailing address was 
used, during testing.  We ended up changing from a majordomo list to a 
simple mail forwarder(*).

I briefly contemplated changing RT to remove 'Precedence: bulk' from the 
list of headers that RT considers as belonging to mail that shouldn't be 
replied to.  But, for reasons implied by Jesse's comments (though with a 
different slant), I didn't want to take such a rash action that would fly 
in the face of standard mail header usage.

Mike

(*) It was first set up as a majordomo list because the self-service web 
page provided by the campus central mail server administrators no longer 
allows setting up of simple mail forwarders (because of spam issues). 
Once this problem with RT was discovered, special arrangements were made 
with the server administrators to get a simple list created for this 
purpose.

_________________________________________________________________________
Mike Friedman                        IST/System and Network Security
mikef at ack.Berkeley.EDU               2484 Shattuck Avenue
1-510-642-1410                       University of California at Berkeley
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~mikef  http://security.berkeley.edu
_________________________________________________________________________

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