Format of Out of Office Message

[Jaime]

We have an email account that receives many messages from customers and we
can't respond as quickly as we'd like. We want to set an out of office
message on the account so we can direct customers to various links on our web
site in case that would answer their question.

When I wrote the document in word, I included hyperlinks that could be
clicked on, and used a few indents. Nothing any fancier. But the hyperlinks
show up as plain text and the indents were lost.

Is there any way to preserve this formatting for the message or do you have
another idea about how to handle the problem?

Thanks in advance.

 

[F.H. Muffman]

We have an email account that receives many messages from customers

and we can't respond as quickly as we'd like. We want to set an out
of office message on the account so we can direct customers to various
links on our web site in case that would answer their question.

When I wrote the document in word, I included hyperlinks that could be
clicked on, and used a few indents. Nothing any fancier. But the
hyperlinks show up as plain text and the indents were lost.

Is there any way to preserve this formatting for the message or do you
have another idea about how to handle the problem?

Well, first, I'd recommend not using OOF for this.

When I was looking for a job, I thought it was kind of silly that the auto-responders
all said 'Out of Office' on the Subject line when it most definitely wasn't
an out of office message, but was a simple 'Thanks for your application'.
It really showed an environment that hadn't explored Exchange/Outlook functionality
and were ok looking kinda foolish.

Personally, I would go to the Exchange side and use something like http://www.cdolive.com/autoreply.htm.

Otherwise, on the Outlook side:

http://www.timeatlas.com/mos/Email/Outlook/Create_Auto_Reply_Emails_with_Outlook_Rules_&_Template/

 

[Jaime]

Thanks for the tips. I'm an end-user, so started with your second
suggestion. It works very well, except Outlook said it was a client-only
rule, which I think will be a problem in this case. I've asked our IT dept.
if there's a way to make the rule server-based, but have no idea if it's even
possible.

But the formatting was preserved in the test I did by e-mailing from another
account. just didn't invoke the rule until I opened the original e-mail
account.

Oh well.

 

[F.H. Muffman]

We have an email account that receives many messages from customers

Thanks for the tips. I'm an end-user, so started with your second
suggestion. It works very well, except Outlook said it was a
client-only rule, which I think will be a problem in this case. I've
asked our IT dept. if there's a way to make the rule server-based, but
have no idea if it's even possible.

But the formatting was preserved in the test I did by e-mailing from
another account. just didn't invoke the rule until I opened the
original e-mail account.

There should be a rule option 'Have server reply with..' which wouldn't be
client side only.