Hi,

After a brief moment of reflection: I believe that tools are not special and don’t require special rules. A tool is just some email-related code that doesn’t fit in any of the common buckets. A tool may, for example, read an email, store the sender’s address in a database and send mail to that address later. This is something a calendar tool might do. It’s also very like a reply, except that the body text is probably not like a reply and the subject may not be Re:…

Therefore, I think that the tools section should say that… let’s see…

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Many systems include special tools that do not match the other sections in this document, the most common being perhaps a filtering tool with conditional forwarding, or a vacation autoresponse tool. These tools are too diverse to fully specify.

In general, such tools do two or three of 1) read incoming mail, 2) store or process the information there, and 3) send mail (at once or later). The same rules/conditions apply to such tools as if step 2 (storage/processing) were done by a human, and steps 1+3 using webmail or a MUA.

In addition, if a tool has a user interface where addresses may be entered or displayed, […] apply mutatis mutandis.

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Utilising latin quotations appropriately conveys gravitas 😉

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Arnt Gulbrandsen

UA Technology Sr. Manager, ICANN

+32 492 374706