I sent an email to a well-known sociologist last night and got a fascinating auto-reply vacation message:
“This is a vacation message to tell you that I will not look at what you’ve written for days and days. You might be jealous that you are working and I am off at the tropical island paradise of s– r——. But perhaps you are about to go on vacation too, and you just were letting me know, in which case I thank you for your consideration. Perhaps we will meet on the shuffleboard court. But now I wonder, if, as you board the seaplane, you too enable a vacation message, perhaps somewhat more terse than this one, and you do it just before my message reaches you, will yours then bounce and set off mine which will bounce back to you, and so on and so on etcetera etcetera etcetera, like a photon between two perfect and perfectly parallel mirrors? Would this overflow our email servers? Would it bring down our local area networks? Would there be a domino effect that would cause a catastrophic cascade of calamitous crashes across the entire world? And would we, in the hot sun of s– r—–, drinking out of coconut shells and watching the sunset, and speaking of the mysteries of the sea, mind at all?”
That’s brilliant.
And it made me wonder about infinite auto-reply emails bouncing back and forth…could that really happen?
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I’m willing to try that if you are…..
I was thinking of setting up two Gmail accounts to do it, lighting the fuse, and stepping back. I’ve never used auto-reply on Gmail, but I’m assuming it’s doable.
Google says: 1 - 10 of about 1,190,000 for vacation email loops. (0.22 seconds)
Answer — yes, it happens all the time (the more common case is interactions between vacation and a mailing list the vacationer subscribes to.. mailing list sends to vacationer, vacation sends a message back, which is now a new message to the list…)
There are ways of filtering out the most common cases, but every now and then *something* will sneak through.
Thanks for the info, Jonathan.
And this is just one of the many reasons why emails systems are a pain in the butt to administer.
Most auto-replies I’ve dealt with do the “once I’ve auto-replied to you once, that’s it” so any further emails don’t get the auto-reply. It’s probably dependent on the particular systems.
Most respectable SMTP servers examine the message headers to prevent infinite loops.
Well, that just takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it????
Sorta, yeah - but that’s what us IT guys are for
I asked. Well, it’s girlishly slimmer than amazingly one, she said.
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