Re: Auto-reply not being sent in some cases

At 08:31 2012-07-24, Michael Bluejay wrote:
>I'm trying to send an autoreply to senders who leave the Subject: 
>field of their message blank, telling them that my server rejects 
>messages with blank subjects (because in my experience, such 
>no-subject messages are either spam or not worth reading).

Pardon my bluntness, but in doing this, YOU are a BIG part of the 
problem.  If you expect it is spam, chances are, you're "reflecting" 
a spam event on the victim of forgery - someone whose email address 
was plastered onto the spam, but who in no way is responsible for the 
message you're bouncing.  If it isn't a legit sender address, you're 
just sending your message into the ether (and generating a bounce, 
which is at least directed to another address of yours for the 
purpose).  The few people who get a legit message from you about the 
lack of a subject, well, they're not the spammers, so basically 
you're harassing them for being clods - but being a bigger clod in doing so.

Honestly, I fail to see an upside here.

If it weren't bad enough that you're replying to suspect spam, by 
using the -k parm to formail, you're retaining the original message 
body - if it IS spam, you're sending it along to the joe-jobbed 
user.  In doing so, you're setting YOUR mailhost up to be flagged as 
a spamhost in various dnsbls.  Plus pissing someone off, who may 
already be receiving bounces for the joe-jobs, and really doesn't 
need some clod sending them an autoreply about something they didn't 
actually send in the first place.

>   The autoreply works fine in test sends from Yahoo and from a mail 
> client, but when I send from another host's webmail, I don't get 
> the autoreply message.  There is no spam folder on the webmail,

That doesn't mean that they don't discard stuff at the threshold, 
which frankly is an ideal place to do it.

Have you checked your autoreply address for possible replies or 
bounces from the victims, er, ah, test recipients?

>"Executing").  That's the only clue I have as to why messages from 
>two different senders get the autoreply while messages from a 
>webmail don't get the autoreply.  Here are the logs and code:

Go to my website and download my "sandbox" framework.  I have a 
simple shell script that you use in place of sendmail (it's a 
redefinition of $SENDMAIL in procmail), which stores the message and 
parms - rather than invoking the real sendmail.  If it reaches that, 
your procmail is doing it's thing, and you need to find out why your 
MTA isn't sending the message along.

Of course, if you have access to the server logs, you can just check 
the maillog for info about the message - you should see it connect to 
the remote server ("relay") and receive a SMTP id as a result, which 
sendmail logs.

Can't tell you what QMAIL/Postfix/Exim will log though.

The "sent" message may for some reason be held up in your outbound 
mail queue - say because the recipient domain is greylisting it 
(issuing a "temporary" failure).  Though, I'd expect your test 
messages to not have actual spam in them, and if you've actually sent 
legit messages from your host to the webmail that have been 
delivered, greylisting seems less likely the problem.  Have you sent 
them from the same address?  The webmail host may be back connecting 
to your host to verify YOUR sending address is legit (though THAT 
should result in a bounce - though where does that go if the sending 
address isn't necessarily legit?)  Bottom line: check your mail server logs.

>                 :0
>                 * !To:[email protected]
>                 [email protected]

FTR, unless you really need to forward the message within your system 
to a separate _user_, you're better off, performance-wise just 
storing it into a folder.

>Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

I'd start the list with "replying to spam".  Rethink your strategy 
here - it's one thing to have a front-end on a list processor that 
rejects messages from _known_subscribers_ which don't meet posting 
requirements, but replying to all inbound mail because it lacks a 
subject will not end well.

---
  Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

  Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
  Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.