Re: Out of Office Auto Reply being taboo

Daniel Koger wrote:
> 
> Also, I apologize to the group for any social indiscretion.

Incidentally, on that subject, would it be possible for people to setup
their mail clients correctly? Although Outlook defaults to commit every
breach of Netiquette possible, it is possible to set it up so it works
better:

In Outlook:

Tools/Options

Select the preferences tab and click E-mail Options

From the 'When replying to a message' menu select 'Prefix each line of
the orginal message'. It will popup a warning telling you that this is a
bad idea, because it's not intelligent enough to spellcheck properly (it
can't ignore the old message) if you do this, but ignore it. 

Select 'Prefix each line with' and type >.

After clicking ok, click Mail Format and select plain text. It will
probably warn you (?), but ignore it.

Unfortunately there is still no way to remove the redundant header:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: L. David Baron [mailto:dbaron@fas.harvard.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 8:25 AM
> To: dkoger@hdtd.com
> Subject: Re: Out of Office AutoReply: blocks within inlines

which simply repeats what is at the top of the window unless you do so
manually.

Also, please observe quoting conventions: 

rather than appending the entire message at the end of your message, the
same benefit (context) but significantly enhanced (i.e. you don't have
to re-read the entire message, and less bandwidth is not wasted) can be
achieved by putting your reply below the text you are replying to (as
below).

remove the parts of the message that you are not replying to - this
makes it quicker for the people reading your message to do so, and can
save much bandwidth: when you are posting to many lists, each with many
subscribers this can be significant: your 900 byte message takes up
nearly 6k, partly because of this, but also because of the way your mail
reader is configured so that it bloats it with <FONT SIZE=3D2> tags

do not set Importance: high in your message header 


> Please do not set autoreply mechanims that respond to people who send
> messages to lists you recieve.  This can be done by any of:
> 
>  * getting an autoreply mechanism that does not respond to messages
>    from lists

You can setup Outlook to do this by setting up rules in its Out of
Office Assitant (I think (I haven't used it)); unfortunately it doesn't
support regular expressions so you will have to do it manually for each
list. (Although it might be possible to configure your mail server (I'm
not sure whether Exchange supports scripting (or even whether there are
actually any scripting facilities on the server platform), but with
other mail programs/platforms you could easily write a script; for
example, popular webmail programs such as Yahoo! Mail use FreeBSD (see
http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=mail.yahoo.com), as does Hotmail
(see http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.hotmail.com) so this might
be a route you could follow).

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Received on Wednesday, 2 August 2000 10:12:59 UTC