Re: comments: draft-moore-auto-email-response-04.txt

[Arnt Gulbrandsen <[e-mail]>]

Keith Moore writes:
> auto-submitted doesn't want to be come a general-purpose message 
> labelling mechanism. arguably we have too many of those already. we 
> could use content-disposition or content-type or 
> content-description....

The example I posted, "auto-submitted: auto-generated; generator=sophos; 
type=antivirus". Where should it go? Is it reasonable in the first 
place? Markus has presented a case that such details are useful - a 
sufficient case?

Content-Type is about the content's format, not about its nature. That 
is to say, it's text/plain rather than text/essay or text/autoresponse.

Content-Description is unstructured human-readable text which IMO makes 
it unusable.

Content-Disposition is about how the receiver should present the 
message, e.g. a suggested filename for a file. I suppose something like 
"type=antivirus" might go here, since the purpose of that is to enable 
appropriate disposition (AKA file in /dev/null).

I've seen X-Mailer and User-Agent, but can't summon much enthusiasm for them.

So if an autoresponder wants to say something about which generator 
auto-generated a message, auto-submitted seems the right place. The 
"type" could go either here or in content-disposition, both seem about 
equally appropriate to me, depending on whether the "type" is seen as 
the type of responder or the type of response.

--Arnt