Both forward and autoreply

[Rich Graves]

We've got an emeritus faculty member John Doe <jdoe@example.edu> and a new executive Jane A. Doe <jadoe@example.edu>. John keeps getting Jane's mail.

John actually prefers to have his email forwarded to Yahoo! Mail anyway. But he doesn't want to lose correspondence to his old address, since he's been jdoe@example.edu for more than 20 years.

What we'd like is for email sent to jdoe to have both a forward and a vacation autoreply disambiguating the two addresses ("If you want John, use john.doe@yahoo.com; if you want Jane, use jadoe@example.edu"). But it doesn't work. The forward trumps the autoreply.

I have also tried making a forward-then-discard rule. That doesn't work either. I tried Trash rather than Discard. That resulted in

2008-04-03 08:46:41,641 INFO [LmtpServer-25768] [name=jdoe@example.edu;mid=2488;] mailbox - outofoffice not sent (in trash) mid=9904 rcpt='jdoe@example.edu'

All quite reasonable and correct, but not what I want in this specific case!

An autoreply set on the Yahoo! Mail end won't work, because (again, being quite reasonable and correct) Yahoo! Mail won't autoreply unless the yahoo.com address appears in To: or Cc:.

[Rich Graves]

Originally Posted by Rich Graves

An autoreply set on the Yahoo! Mail end won't work, because (again, being quite reasonable and correct) Yahoo! Mail won't autoreply unless the yahoo.com address appears in To: or Cc:.

Actually, Yahoo autoreplies are promiscuous as to To/Cc, but have two undesirable features:

1) In my tests, they always ended up in GMail's Spam folder
2) The subject line is always "Yahoo! Auto Response" with no reference to the original message.

I'd like the autoreply to come from jdoe@example.edu, not john.doe@yahoo.com. And I'd like not to have to write my own vacation program, duplicating the work of caching addresses already replied to, skipping Precedence: list and daemon addresses, etc.