add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?

[Grant Taylor]

On 1/4/23 4:19 PM, Julien ÉLIE wrote:
> According to RFC 3834, the auto-generated keyword is intended to be used 
> on messages generated by automatic processes such as cron jobs, and that 
> are not direct responses to other messages or manually generated messages.

Yep.  "not direct responses to other messages" is key.  (More below.)

> This "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" header field could then be used in:
> - Daily Usenet reports (news.daily);
> - newgroup/rmgroup/checkgroups reports (controlchan);
> - top1000 reports (sendinpaths);
> - failure or warning reports from various programs (mailpost, expirerm, 
> rc.news, innwatch, writelog);
> - our internal wrapper to sendmail or like (innmail, with a new option 
> that will add it, as some use cases may include manually generated mails 
> -- most of the above programs use it).

I really like what you're thinking.

> At least it does not do any harm to add that header field, either the 
> mail client knows that header field or does not.

:-)

> Are we OK that the following 2 use cases should *not* have that header 
> field?
> - mails generated for the news -> mail gatewaying process;
> - mails generated for the moderating process (posts to a moderated 
> newsgroup without an Approved header field).

I think that these can have a different value -- from memory* -- 
auto-replied.  These types of things are mechanical / automatically 
generated messages "that are in direct response to other messages or 
manually generated messages".

But if you don't agree with the auto-replied, them I'm perfectly fine 
not having the auto-submitted: header in this small subset of messages.

N.B. I'm now 15 hours into a server outage recovery that started about 
the time I was going to go to bed.  I've not slept yet.  So I'm likely 
misremembering minutia about the auto-submitted: header.

> I think these mails fall in the "manually generated" category (they are 
> just somehow "forwarded" elsewhere), but the definition is not very clear.

I think the forwarding is the automita that makes them qualify as 
auto-submitted: auto-replied.  The new outbound message is in direct 
response to the inbound message.  What's more is the original message 
author probably has no clue that the content of their message is being 
forwarded in an email and would almost certainly deny having sent the 
the email to the ultimate recipient.

> And my best wishes for this new Year to all of the inn-workers readers!

Likewise.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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