brain teaser : third brain needed to work this one out

[brendan]

here's a brain teaser for someone with more skills or at least more
lateral thinking capability than me - done my nut over this one...

have written a list manager in PHP which

a) posts out new web bulletin board messages to registered users.
b) recieves emails and posts them to the bulletin board if they have the
right variables in the subject line
The subject line is created by the script and contains the group ID, the
bulletin board message ID and the date ...
looks a bit like this

Re: 'I like big buts and I cannot lie' -- in Booty Officionardo group
##9+365+2004-08-11##


when users reply it is still in the subject line so the script knows
where to post the response.


works wondefully!

problem is ...

when people have autoresponders turned on they respond with that same
subject line which means we get these stupid 'Im not in right now'
messages posted on the board.
I added some script to ensure that if someone posted twice within 30
seconds no response would go out - ie to stop an infinite loop battle
between my list manager and their auto responder

so the question is ..
how the heck do I work out what is an acutal reply and what is an auto
response?

[Average_Joe]

Re: brain teaser : third brain needed to work this one out

In article <cgi51s$fjd$1@p egasus.csx.cam. ac.uk>, brendan wrote:[color=blue]
> so the question is ..
> how the heck do I work out what is an acutal reply and what is an auto
> response?[/color]

That *is* a tough one!

I'd suggest doing a checksum of the message body, if it is the same as
the last one, it's likely spam or an autoresponse. This would, of course
only work if the message doesn't contain quoted material.

Another thing you might try is a loop counter in the subject of some
sort. (Checking to see if there are responses to their own response)

Jamie
--
http://www.geniegate.com Custom web programming
User Management Solutions Perl / PHP / Java / UNIX

[Chung Leong]

Re: brain teaser : third brain needed to work this one out

"brendan" <brendan_nospam _@srl.cam.ac.uk _nospam> wrote in message
news:cgi51s$fjd $1@pegasus.csx. cam.ac.uk...[color=blue]
> problem is ...
>
> when people have autoresponders turned on they respond with that same
> subject line which means we get these stupid 'Im not in right now'
> messages posted on the board.
> I added some script to ensure that if someone posted twice within 30
> seconds no response would go out - ie to stop an infinite loop battle
> between my list manager and their auto responder
>
> so the question is ..
> how the heck do I work out what is an acutal reply and what is an auto
> response?[/color]

Put the email address in the cc field instead and autoresponders don't
respond to carbon copies?