Fighting SPAM: Auto responders – Finding a Balance

After sending an email, we frequently receive an automated mail in reply, such as Out Of Office messages, informing us that the intended recipient is out on vacation or traveling. Other messages would have informed us that the message is queued for delivery, or just cannot be delivered at all, due to the recipient not being available.

Some organizations aggressively respond to these types of messages without mercy by informing real-time blacklisting services, marking such emails as spam. This can possibly cause a well intentioned corporate policy to blacklist the responding organization, causing a resulting loss of reputation and business. Most businesses list email services as more important than phone services – any outage in mail can be crippling for business.

To find a balance between using auto responder messages with the risk of being blacklisted versus not using auto responders altogether is tricky. A number of companies, including a large number of fortune 500 companies responsible for originating huge amount of mail traffic, allow Out Of Office messages to leave their network, on the basis that the original sender would like to be informed on the status of the received mail, especially if the recipient is travelling and cannot reply.

Another approach used especially in the legal sector is to allow Out Of Office functionality, but internally only, so that internal senders are informed of recipient mail status. However, these messages may not leave the corporate firewall.

List mail users, who may have subscribed to a commercial list service such as yahoo groups or other similar services, may be familiar with receiving an Out Of Office message from someone in a company they may not have heard of. This kind of mail becomes classified as spam rather quickly, since it is unwanted and unsolicited.

In my opinion, well managed auto responders as well as the educated users using them, may add enormous value in terms of informing a sender of an alternative person or manager to redirect their mail to. Both mail server and client software today allows intelligent filtering of mail, along with the setting up of rules for managing incoming and outgoing mail, as well as managing who a auto responder may send mail to.

Proper auto responder management may be the right balance to strike, keeping the blacklist knee jerk response at bay, as well as allowing well intentioned corporate and private mail users to benefit.