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

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi Grant,

>> 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.

With your details about "auto-replied", mails from controlchan seem to 
belong to the auto-replied category instead of auto-generated.  As a 
matter of fact, the reports (actions taken or that should be taken) are 
sent when receiving a control message.
I would then use "Auto-Submitted: auto-replied" for controlchan.

Same thing for failure reports when treating a message, as mailpost 
does.  It is an auto-replied mail, not an auto-generated one; and RFC 
3834 even has a note about it (for non-delivery reports):

     Some widely-deployed SMTP implementations
     currently use "auto-generated" to label non-delivery reports.
     These should be changed to use "auto-replied" instead.


So you're right that we should consider any actions triggered by the 
reception of a message as an auto-reply, and not an auto-generation.



>> 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.

I agree that these two processes (gatewaying and moderation) fall in the 
auto-replied category.
My worry is that we'll end up injecting articles with an Auto-Submitted 
header field into Netnews.
The moderation software will receive an article encapsulated into a 
mail, with an Auto-Submitted header field.  I guess it does not know 
that header field, and keep it when posting the approved article.  And 
we'll have Auto-Submitted header fields in most of the articles posted 
to moderated newsgroups...
Same thing for the resulting mail or article when gatewaying.

That's why I am still not inclined to add that header field for these 2 
cases.  I don't want to generate possible unforeseen problems.

I'm otherwise OK with all the reports mentioned at the beginning of this 
mail.



> 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.

I hope the problem is now solved and have recovered from your lost sleep 
hours :-)

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

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