Member Avatar for Ghislaine

Below is copy of a header from a recently received email. I understand most of it, but have no idea what the Precedence: Junk statement means. Any ideas?

I ought to mention that I have been firing off emails to an internet seller about not receiving my goods and keep receiving auto-answer messages from them, all with this mysterious statement. It's a fact that they are treating my emails to them as junk (i,.e. by sending automated rather than human-written replies), but what does the Precedence statement do?

I should be fascinated and grateful to learn more - over to you, you clever Daniwebbers!

Thanks, Ghislaine

Return-Path: <>
Received: from by mailstore
for id 1LMlPM-4GAVbs-04-DQV;
Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:42:24 +0000
Received: from [] (lhlo=)
by with lmtp id 1LMlPM-4GAVbs-04
for ; Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:42:24 +0000
Received: from [] (helo=)
by with esmtp id 1LMlPM-0005KY-B7
for ; Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:42:24 +0000
Received: (qmail 32618 invoked by uid 1000); 13 Jan 2009 15:42:03 -0000
Message-ID: <>
Date: 13 Jan 2009 08:42:03 -0700
Delivered-To:
Precedence: junk
to: "yyy" <> etc etc etc

  • 1 Contributor
  • 1 Reply
  • 188 Views
  • 6 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Ghislaine

Dani AI

Generated

— good catch, and your hunch is basically right: Precedence: junk is an informal, non‑standard hint that many older mailing-list engines and autoresponders set to mark a message as low‑priority or automated. The modern, standards‑recommended way to label auto‑generated replies is the Auto-Submitted header (RFC 3834), but because Precedence is widespread a lot of servers and scripts still look for it. (rfc-editor.org)

In the wild, Precedence is used two ways: as a hint to file or deprioritise mail (so it can be shoved to a "bulk/junk" queue), and as a signal to automated responders not to send an out‑of‑office or ticket‑reply back to that address. Mailman, Sieve rules and many MTAs explicitly check for precedence values when deciding whether to suppress automatic replies or treat mail as list/bulk traffic; that explains the automated, non‑human replies you’ve been getting. (lists.gnu.org)

Practical next steps: view the full message source and look for any of these headers — Precedence / X-Precedence, Auto-Submitted, X-Auto-Response-Suppress, List-ID / List-Unsubscribe and the Return-Path — they tell you how the sender marked the message and how recipients are likely to treat it. If you need a human reply, ask the seller to whitelist your address or to stop marking their outbound/system messages as low‑priority; if you run an autoresponder, follow RFC 3834 and/or use Exchange’s X-Auto-Response-Suppress instead of relying solely on Precedence. (rfc-editor.org)

In short: Precedence: junk is a hint that many systems obey to avoid reply‑loops and to sort bulk mail, so your diagnosis is sound — but it’s not a formal standard and behavior varies by server/software, so checking the full headers is the quickest way to know exactly what’s happening. (exim-users.exim.narkive.com)

Member Avatar for Ghislaine

Me again, feeling somewhat sheepish, as I have found an answer of sorts, from the website (Finnish, I suspect) which deals with RFCs and other Internet standards. I quote:

Precedence:
Sometimes used as a (a) priority value which can influence transmission speed and delivery. Common values are "bulk" and "first-class". Other uses is to (b) control automatic replies like delivery status reports and vacation notices and to (c) control return-of-content facilities, and to (d) stop mailing list loops.

Non-standard, controversial, widely used. Because it is used for so many different purposes, there is a risk that creator and user of this header mean different things.

So, in a way, my instinct was right and those bad people at xxx.co.uk are surely using that attribute to shunt replies into some kind of junk folder (i.e. controlling return-of-content) which they look at only now and then.

Sorry to have posted prematurely, and for answering my own question. However, if you can give me further information on this fascinating subject, I should be delighted to receive it.

Regards, Ghislaine

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.