On Out of Office emails

 August 26, 2024

This summer, I found myself multiple times reading out-of-office emails. Actually, this is not a new phenomenon: it has happened every summer since I started working. Obviously, it also happens outside the summer, but it is far easier to notice it during the summer.

I think the majority of people should not configure an out-of-office replyer.

By recipient

Many people might write to you and receive an out-of-office email if you have set up an out-of-office replayer. Let’s analyze the various personas that might send you emails and whether the out-of-office message makes sense for them.

An idea to fight spam

 February 28, 2013

Today I would like to give you an idea on how to implement a spam system that can reduce some kind of spam.

The problem

Sometimes a company or a politician, that does not respect the usual privacy policy, continues to send e-mails even if the user already tried to unsubscribe.

My postulates

The people who usually send this kind of e-mail are not very familiar with how e-mail work or how the privacy policy works. Obviously there is the case in which they are malicious, but I prefer to think that the biggest part of these people are in the first two cases.
These people probably will have issues removing a person from a mailing list, therefore they will tend not doing it, unless they have an advantage.
Is really annoying sending an e-mail to 10 contacts and receive 8 mail-delivery-subsystem errors.

My approach

My approach is dividable in two directions that have to be implemented as features from the e-mail provider:

How to send an e-mail with attachment from the command line

 January 3, 2013

Have you ever had to develop a script in UNIX that has to send an email?

If you have, probably you have used the “mail” function since this program is the standard program to send e-mails in UNIX environments if you are using the CLI (Command Line Interface).

The manual for mail reports this as mail usage prototype:

mail -r [sender] -s [subject] receiver-1[,receiver-2,...,receiver-n] > [File with the body]

I think all the parameters are pretty straightforward except the “File with the body” one. This has to be an ASCII file (ie: .txt) with the e-mail body content in the text-only mode.