Switch off Your Email Autoresponder
September 10th, 2007 · by David Bradley
Do you have an autoresponder set up on your email account? You know, one of those messages that gets sent back hands-free to tell everyone you are “out of the office”, “at a conference”, or “lounging on a sunny beach shades on, with a dry martini in one hand, a trashy novel in the other, and some totty rubbing Factor 25 into your rapidly flushing skin”? That kind of autoresponder?
Well, if you have enemies, then you should switch it off right now. Aside from the fact that you are advertising to all those spammers that you are not at your usual place of work, whether that’s a small office, a home office, or a small home office, you could also be opening your email account to a nasty case of denial of service.
Think about it, you write a blog, you annoy a reader enough that they email you direct. They get the bounceback that tells them you are sunning it in exotic climes, or whatever. They take even greater umbrage and decide to send you another annoyed missive, they get the bounceback again and so on. Quickly it occurs to them that one way to really annoy you and so exact some kind of vengeance for your blogging habit might be to fill up your email inbox. They could simply fire off email after email each with an enormous dummy attachment, or perhaps some obscene photography. Your inbox quickly fills up and when they have succeeded, they get one final bounceback from your account to tell them, not that you’ve moved on to bronzing oil after the Factor 25, but that your inbox is unavailable because it is full. Job done.
Now, when your next correspondent comes along, perhaps with that golden deal on your blog or a once in a lifetime job offer, they too get the box unavailable error. They never even find out that you’ve now turned the color of the freshly cooked lobster on which you’re dining that evening, all they get is a frustrating bounceback and quickly move on to the next candidate on their shortlist.
Personally, I have never used an autoresponder. In fact, I never spend time sunning myself on beaches, I am here, 24/7, 365.25 days a year, so have no need of one. You might have a life, make sure the virtual side doesn’t get messed up for the sake of a little sunscreen.
Science News
Join me on StumbleUpon
My Facebook Page
Flickr Photos
My Twitter microblog
Network with me on LinkedIn
My reading list
Sig Figs Calc
Tech Jobs
6 responses so far ↓
I’m on the South Yorkshire Business Link mailing list, and I remember getting a ‘guidance’ notice on Auto-Responders and crime.
Their angle was that if people know you’re out, you’re more likely to have your offices broken into.
So maybe some crappy emails are the least of your problems?
Totally agree…it’s like leaving a note on the front door saying, “We’re on holiday right, leave us a note in the kitchen, the back door is open”
I knew this guy one time who was on a mailing list, and naively set his auto responder when he went on vacation.
A legitimate message was sent to the mailing list, he received it, his auto responder responded. But since he was on the very mailing list that he was responding to, that auto response got sent to him too.
His auto responder then responded to the auto response, and it kept going around in an infinite loop until the moderator of the list removed him. Everyone on the mailing list got hundreds of this guy’s auto responses!
So not only are you more likely to get an email denial of service or an office break-in, if you’re on a mailing list you might send hundreds of bogus emails to lots of people. Not a good idea.
The claims of an infinite loop thing doesn’t sound genuine to me. Mail servers have a built-in safeguard to prevent more than a couple of cycles occurring. I learned that way back in the early 90s when I went on vacation and had left an autoresponder running on the first ever list I joined FoodWine-L (anyone remember it?)
Maybe I’m wrong about the cause of those hundreds of messages (the only plausible explanation to me seemed to be an infinite loop), but something did happen where the guy’s auto responder sent hundreds of responses to everyone on the mailing list.
Is it possible that the email server they were using didn’t have that safeguard (it was using a Yahoo! Groups account for the email list).
It could’ve been a glitch. But, that protection system has been in place for years and years, long before even I started on the net back in 1989!
Leave a Comment