At 4:56 PM -0500 1/19/02, Paul Thomas is rumored to have typed:
Sounds like a job for procmail.
You are, of course, welcomed to do so. I tried alerting various addresses, including the two you mentioned, some pulled from a lookup of the netblock owners, and culled from the website *, numerous times and was completely ignored. I frankly prefer not to hear from their machine if it's so damaged, and so just reject SMTP conections (with the hopefully helpful error, "572 Fix your broken mailer"). In this case, an autoresponse seems the _worst_ way to deal with it, since it is a complaint about a broken autoresponse. I _know_ the bounce is going to the envelope sender in this case, since the SMTP connection is dropped on the floor before the DATA transaction. (Besides...we ain't talking about AOL here. Do you really think anyone on your machine would notice if massart.edu couldn't mail into your box? Ever even _hear_ of the place before they started annoying those of us who post to this list?) Charlie * Specifically postmaster@exon.massart.edu, postmaster@massart.edu, lchmielecki@massart.edu, rbrinson@massart.edu, boudreau@massart.edu, postmaster@rcn.com, noc@rcn.com