Ask HN: Standard auto replies for email providers

I run a system that sends bulk email on behalf of customers. If I send an email to a non-existent address (old address book, mistyped email) then I usually get a bounce message in a machine-readable format that makes it very easy for me to mark the address as bad and to potentially flag high bounce rates against my customers.

However, a lot of email that comes back is setup as a basic auto-reply by the user. Things like "I no longer check this mailbox" or "I am/will be changing my email address" etc. These imply an error but because they are hand-written, they contain hundreds of phrases, some more specific than others and are much harder to automatically process.

I kind of think that we are far enough into the age of bulk-email service providers that people like GMail/Yahoo/Office365 etc. should provide a more useful mechanism for canned responses. Currently if you add an "out of office" it is nothing other than a message. If, instead, you could add "No longer using mailbox" or "Away for extended period" than it would allow the recipients system to send back a machine-parseable version of the auto-reply with an appropriate SMTP code e.g. "No longer using mailbox" could return a standard 5.1.6 response.

I'm not sure why with email being such a large part of most people's online footprint, that we aren't doing more to help make things much clearer. Currently it is much harder for me to try and respect privacy and enforcement of spam due to these sorts of things.