On Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:34:23 -0700, Jian Gao wrote:
Hello,
I just installed RoundCube 0.4 on my mail server(centos5, Postfix, Courier, MySQL) and it look great. Then I installed the Vacation Plugin V.1.9.9. Now when I click Setting I got:
Pardon me for being an annoying ass here, but using a web mail client as an autoresponder is a silly idea.
Like, okay, you're going to leave your client box running with your browser open and logged into your RoundCube while you go on vacation just so that it could auto respond? That just seems wrong. If Rube Goldberg had designed a vacation auto-responder, this would be it!
Vacation auto-responding itself is a silly idea, because you shouldn't trust a robot to indiscriminately reply to all your mails. What if it replies to spam? You need a very reliable spam filter in front of it.
These auto-responders have been known to screw up, and, for instance, auto-reply to every piece of mailing list traffic.
Auto-responders will annoy people if you are involved in group discussions which continue while you are gone vacation. Unless the responder is clever about this, every time someone does a "reply all" to a debate which happens to include you, he is greeted with a reminder that, yes, you are still on vacation.
You know, maybe the people close to you that need to know you are on vacation can be so informed, and who cares about the rest?
Letting the world know you are away from home is a home security risk, too.
If you must have it, this kind of auto-responding is a job for external mail processing. Find yourself a some nice vacation handling Procmail script which has been debugged to death for twenty years and use that.
But let me finish by disclosing my vested interest. I'm involved in a commercial startup which is developing a vacation auto-non-responder. What this software will do is, on your behalf, ignore all e-mails while you are on vacation. Upon your return, you can take the reins: disable the software and resume ignoring e-mails yourself. Thus, your appearance that you are unreachable (because you are incredibly important and busy) continues uninterrupted during your travels.
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