Please use proper message headers (FFS)

Writing software that deals with automated message processing on the Internet is, in a word, painful. The number of people who cannot seem to read simple specifications and/or proposals is staggering.

And one would think that if you can’t read specifications, you’d at least bother to “View message source” on a few thousand e-mail message to get a feel for how some other (well known) companies are doing it, INSTEAD OF INVENTING YOUR OWN STANDARD.

So, if you’re sending out automated e-mail messages, for example, please add one of these headers:

auto-submitted
x-auto-response-supress
precedence
feedback-id
x-autoreply

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look them up … and if you’re doing some kind of mailing list stuff, please add:

list-id
list-unsubscribe

Thank you!

You may now resume sleep mode.

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