This is an automatic reply, to let you know that a test message from you (or listing your address in the Reply-To header) recently arrived here at news system "ee.und.ac.za", which is in the Electronic Engineering department at the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa. A lot of people are confused by automatic reply messages, so this message tries quite hard to explain what is going on. If you have any good suggestions for ways in which the wording of this message can be improved, please send them to <[email protected]>. Some of the reasons people post test messages is to check whether their news system is correctly configured to let their messages get out, and to check whether their mail system is correctly configured to let mail get back to them. Because of these uses of test messages, some news administrators -- trying to be helpful -- configure their news systems to send automatic responses. It is possible that somebody tricked you into posting a test message, or that somebody else forged a test message that either appeared to be from you or directed replies to you. If that is what happened to you, then you may be able to use the information below to help you to track down the perpetrator. Each message in almost all of the *.test newsgroups is a considered as a candidate for an automatic reply like this one. If the message header or the first few lines of the body contains any of the phrases "ignore", "no reply", "do not reply" or a few other variants, then the message is ignored. If the message does not contain any of those trigger phrases, then the auto-replier sends back a reply like this one. (If you get more than one copy of this reply, that might mean that there is a problem in the mail system; please ask your local mail administrator for help.) It's too late to have any effect on this message, because this reply has already been sent, but in future, if you do not want to receive automatic replies like this, then you should either refrain from posting messages to the *.test newsgroups, or ensure that your postings to the *.test newsgroups contain the trigger phrases that will cause your messages to be ignored by auto-repliers. Please also note that name has not been added to any kind of subscription list, so there's no need to try to unsubscribe or to send "ignore" messages back via electronic mail. By the way, this site receives messages in certain newsgroups, or with certain distributions, that some people might consider to be unusual for a site in South Africa. We do that deliberately, so please don't be too surprised. If you want to write to the human who administers the news system that generated this auto-reply message, the address <[email protected]> should work.
A copy of the header and the first few lines of the body of your test message.