Changing Precedence to junk

[John Ireland]

I spoke to Julian about this last week at at the JANET-CERT meeting in
London and I thought I would mail the list to see what others thought of
the idea.

Our mail queue is continually filled with auto responder mail replying
to spam messages.  These messages either time out or bounce, spamming
the user with more useless information.

Most auto responders, such as vacation, will not respond to mail with
the 'Precedence: bulk' or 'Precedence: junk' line is included in the
header.  So giving mailscanner the option of changing the 'Precedence:'
header to junk would give a simple centrally managed solution.

I know there are other solutions - ban auto responders,  write a
procmail wrapper for vacation, or hack the vacation code.   But there
are users that need to use auto responders and there are auto responders
over which the mail administrator has no control.

Also, I know of no other program, other than 'vacation', that uses the
'Precedence:' header.


--
John Ireland                      Email: mailto:J.Ireland at hgu.mrc.ac.uk
MRC Human Genetics Unit           Tel. : +44-31-332-2471
Western General Hospital          Fax. : +44-31-343-2620
Edinburgh, EH4 2XU, UK            WWW  : http://www.hgu.mrc.ac.uk