New scourges of the Internet

[dmaze]

Automatic e-mail responders. I think these are even worse than viruses and spam; there are good techniques for filtering those out. But with the recent batch of Windows virus, I've been getting all kinds of auto-responses to public mailing lists ("thanks for your inquiry to the Western Tanzania Slinky Warehouse!"). Still worse are auto-responders that respond to the message From: line and say "you sent a virus out". Sure, these are well-intentioned, but having seen 30 or 40 of these on a big mailing list makes them not quite so entertaining. I mean, do these people realize that it's trivial to forge the From: line on a message? The Exchange-based "out of office autoreply" functionality is pretty evil, too, since this means I get several messages (at least, only one per sender) whenever I post to a mailing list. Sigh.