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

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> 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.

I apologize for being late to this discussion, but this doesn't seem
correct for me for controlchan.  The notifications sent by controlchan are
not an autoreply to the sender of the control message.  They are a status
report sent to the news administrator about a change made (or proposed) on
their news server by a third party.  As such, they're equivalent to the
daily report or the notification messages from innwatch.  The fact that
the change to the server was initiated by a netnews message doesn't feel
horribly relevant.

A "reply" by definition goes back to the sender of the message;
notification messages that go to third parties feel inherently different.

I think Auto-Submitted: auto-generated is correct for these.

> I agree that these two processes (gatewaying and moderation) fall in the
> auto-replied category.

Gatewaying (of which moderation is a subset) is yet a different thing, and
I don't think the Auto-Submitted header is appropriate here with any
value.  These messages are not Auto-Submitted; they're, well, gatewayed.
This is equivalent to email forwarding; if you send email to me at, say,
rra at cpan.org, the cpan.org mail servers don't add Auto-Submitted headers
when they forward that mail to my underlying mailbox.

*If* we were encapsulating messages when sending them to moderators, I
could see an argument for Auto-Submitted: auto-generated in the outer
envelope, but since we're transforming and forwarding a message, I think
this is just part of the message propagation path and thus should not be
labeled with Auto-Submitted.  The message is not, in general,
auto-submitted; it was manually posted by the poster of the message, and
we're just passing it along to its ultimate recipient.

Also, on a more practical level, I think addition of this header is
potentially surprising to moderators.  Their mail client may rightfully
downgrade or refile messages with Auto-Submitted headers, particularly
Auto-Submitted: auto-replied, since the vast majority of such messages are
vacation auto-replies that are of low importance or that people may even
auto-delete.  I think there's some risk of confusing submitted posts for a
moderated group, which are relatively important mail, for relatively
unimportant mail like vacation autoreplies or automated status messages.

All the other changes look fine; it was just those two that didn't sound
right to me.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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