Just noticed something.. my cluster-1 reseller plans include the Email Auto Responder service in the options, whereas the cluster-2 reseller plans do not. Is there a reason for this, or is it an accidental omission?
Don’t tell me it’s been removed because of spam problems?
My customers sometimes ask for this, for when they go on holiday.
ok:
it’s been removed because of spam problems
It was officially removed from the plans when we first launched cluster2, I think there was even a bit of discussion about it.
:hurt:
For that, you deserve to suffer new threads and repeated questions about it. 
Actually I do have a question about this - why does Yahoo mail have a “vacation response” ability, and obviously don’t feel it’s a spam issue, but yours causes you concern? Is there some difference which makes Yahoo mail able to provide it?
Well they control their spam filters, which them and hotmail are the first to blacklist for auto responders ‘spam’
Hotmail and Yahoo are increasingly just banning anyone and everyone, wanting you to signup for their sender verification programs for you can deliver to them. It’s happening more and more now 
Ok.. how about this, is it possible to simply restrict the number of autoresponder emails that go out per day? I mean under normal use, a single email address won’t get that many hits a day. Also, the incoming email shouldn’t be included in the response.
Alternatively, make the user define a list of contact addresses which will receive the vacation response. No other incoming addresses will get it. This ensures that recipients of autoresponder emails will be legit and won’t flag it as spam. Just ideas here.
But if you don’t include the received email in the autoresponder, why would spammers use it anyway? Don’t they just use ones which pass on their content to other people?
:deadhorse
I don’t think it’s the content that’s the problem. I am frequently tempted to report auto reply messages as Spam when a Spammer forges one of my email addresses in their Reply to and/or Return address - especially if I get inundated with them.
All it takes is for someone with a Yahoo or hotmail account to flag several such unwanted auto replies as Spam and your mail server IP is toast.
Is that why they do that? So that you won’t mark it as spam because it has an impact on your own email address? Makes sense.. I thought they did that just because might help to get past spam filters. Interesting.
I believe the main reason they forge the return address is so the sender doesn’t get the bounces. As most Spam is sent from hijacked computers, receiving a lot of bounces and/or autp replied would tend to make the victim suspect something was up. It’s better to have bounces and auto replies sent elsewhere - anywhere else.
What I didn’t say very well, was that it is the auto replying mail server that is considered the Spammer as it is sending unsolicited messages by replying to the wrong email address. Regardless of the content, the receiver of unwanted auto replies is being Spammed. In fact SpamCop now considers misdirected autoreplies as fair game. See their [B]Why are auto responders bad?[/B] page.
Thanks Nzkiwi for explaining the real issue, and Antic this is exactly why they are not offered.
And for a similar reason I am seriously considering withdrawing mail forwarding from my hosting plans. I believe Gmail and Yahoo (and probably many other providers) identify the mail server that offloads email to them as being the source of that email. The IP of the offloading server is the only one that can be verified. Headers identifying any other server could have been forged.
Therefore if a client forwards mail to their Gmail or Yahoo account and that mail is identified as Spam, then it is the IP of their forwarding account that is going to be flagged as the source of the Spam. I don’t know what amount of Spam would need to be forwarded before an IP was blocked, but I can see the potential danger.
I recently had an occasion where BigPond “bounced” hundreds of emails to me because a Spammer had used one of my addresses as the Return-path. The bounces contained the original Spam messages in their entirety. I’m sure that the number of messages involved would have caused the IP of my mail account to have been added to a block list if they were being auto forwarded to a service such as Gmail or Yahoo.