blocking out-of-office

[Glenn Steen]

On 03/08/06, Koopmann, Jan-Peter <Jan-Peter.Koopmann at seceidos.de> wrote:
> On Thursday, August 03, 2006 9:55 AM Glenn Steen wrote:
>
> > The sane solution is to not allow OoO,
>
> Which is easily done in Exchange itself. You can configure it to only send OOO within your Exchange installation but not send it out via SMTP.

Of course. OoO can have a somewhat meaningful role inside the organisation.

> > and encourage your user to use
> > other measures (like "mailbox delegations" etc). Unfortunately PHBs
> > are rarely sane...:-)
>
> And there are situations where you need OOO. We are still developing a small script fetching the OOO status from Exchange and feeding it to a small exim autoresponder. At least that one is configurable and will not send mails back to mailing lists, bulk mail etc. And if your spam detection is good enough OOO will not be a problem for you I suppose.
>

Everyone is entiteled to their own opinion, but ... "Need" is a strong word:).
There are at least two issues at hand. One is the phenomenon as such,
the other is badly behaving MTAs in conjunction with OoO.
Most problems with OoO *could* be alleviated if someone did make a
stab at an RFC, so that we could stop fumbling around trying to wrest
some form of control on the issue and instead have clearly defined
interfaces for it (That's not probable to happen though:-). Then one
would have the policy issue to tangle with...
Having said that, I'd be interrested in seeing what you've
accomplished so far, and perhaps adapting it to a postfix
environment... I assume it's based on some form of more or less clever
LDAP query? (Yeah, I'm an Exim noob:).
Oh BTW, from that you can see that I don't have a particularily sane PHB;-).
-- 
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se