Talk:Autoresponder

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64.201.168.97 added the paragraph starting with "Interestingly, our research has found that since mid 2005" - Whose research? Hopefully not Wikipedia's anyway.

The article lacks a discussion of e-mail problems caused by badly configured autoresponders (talk about "non-technical people" here and what they are doing to the Internet...), such as mailing-list spam and autoresponse ping pong (for best fun, try a combination of both), virus scanner bounces ([1] [2]), auto-responding to spam mails etc. The latter can have a wide variety of undesired effects - if the sender is spoofed (case 1), our BDAR (braindead autoresponder) sends a response (let's say "I'm on vacation") to the spoofed sender. Then we have:

• Case 1a: The spoofed address is invalid - the response will be bounced. A true BDAR will auto-respond to the bounce message, most ARs are hopefully a bit smarter.
• Case 1b: The spoofed address is valid - in the best case, your AR has annoyed a random user, in the worst case, said random user has a BDAR enabled as well.
• Case 2: The address is not spoofed but serves as a feedback tool for the spammer. Your BDAR has just confirmed that your address is live, so you'll get even more of the interesting "newsletters" from said spammer.

This should be mentioned just so that people understand why some major spam filters kill mails they consider automatically generated no matter whether they contain advertisements for "Ci@l1s" or just say "I've currently gone surfing in Honolulu". Aragorn2 14:15, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I removed the sentence about "automatic responder" being more popular, since it's unreferenced, implies original research, and contradicts the easy zeroth order estimate of term popularity -- Google search. I agree the problems with autoresponders that you've stated above exist (and this is a problem with lack of authentication in SMTP in general); please add it to the article including citations. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-09-01 18:41Z