The new watermarking feature in 4.62 - an unexpected side effect?

[Quentin Campbell]

Julian

Am running 4.62.9-2 on 8 gateways with the new watermarking feature enabled.

It has given rise to an increase in requests to "whitelist" addresses of messages that are being tagged.

The messages in question have a blank 'From:' address following the "Our MailScanner believes that the attachment to this message sent to you..." rubric.

On inspection these messages are almost always 'vacation' or OoO messages. It seems that there are good operational reasons for these sorts of auto responders to set the envelope-sender address to be null. However this causes them to be tagged as spam by MailScanner if watermarking is enabled.

I don't consider it appropriate to whitelist addresses in this situation but they are 'genuine' messages nonethelees and may well be missed if people are filtering into a 'junk mail' folder on the tag. I can't see a way around this.

I note, however, that JANET in its latest guidance on avoiding inappropriate e-mail bounces (April 2007) - http://www.ja.net/cert/email/dontbounce.html - deprecate the use of vacation/OoO so perhaps we will see the use of OoO responders reduce in future?   
   
Quentin
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