Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Rjevski 3223 days ago
Auto relies could easily be weeded out with some simple code.
2 comments

One mistake per day is enough for the knives to come out. On a big mailing list, think about how many 9's of accuracy you have to have to keep one incident from happening per day. Per week. Per month.

If you asked people, one per month would be a 'working' system, if you catch them on a good day. 'Never' is a very long time.

I've never seen it. I'm sure that works "in theory"
A quick Google for "outlook autoreply headers" gave me https://www.jitbit.com/maxblog/18-detecting-outlook-autorepl... -- a more comprehensive list of headers is available at https://github.com/jpmckinney/multi_mail/wiki/Detecting-auto...

Will some things filter through this list? Undoubtedly, but I would be surprised if it's a significant percentage. Extremely high-volume lists probably need some more specific care, to be sure.

Couldn't you filter most of them out by the timestamp? If you get a reply that was sent faster than a human could have responded, ignore it.
The auto-reply is probably sent by a desktop email client, which are often offline and/or configured to only check for new email every few minutes. So you'd fail to mark a lot of auto-replies.
Exchange configures it on the server because generally people have their computers turned off when on holidays.