If you already have a mail profile for the mailbox you want to work with, you’re ready to get started. If not, follow the instructions in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 262054, “XADM: How to Get Service Account Access to All Mailboxes in Exchange 2000†to grant access for the Windows account you're using to the Exchange mailbox store that contains the mailboxes you want to work with. (Make sure that you follow your organization's security and privacy policies.)
Run MFCMAPI.exe and click past the initial screen. If you want to work with an existing mail profile, choose Session, Logon and Display Store Table, and select the desired profile. Otherwise, choose Session, Logon Only, and select any Exchange profile; then choose MDB, Get Mailbox Table, enter the name of the Exchange server, and double-click the name of the mailbox you want to open. Regardless of the logon method, you choose, once you have the mailbox open, you should be able to expand the Root Container node to see the folder hierarchy for the mailbox.
Expand the Top of Information Store node, then right-click the Inbox, and choose Open Associated Contents Table. This is the “hidden messages†content of the Inbox, which contains not only Inbox-specific views, but also all rules for incoming messages, including the Out of Office Assistant rules. To make sense out of the hidden messages, scroll across in the window displaying the associated contents until you see the Message Class column. This property will tell you what type of item each row refers to.
Look for the item whose message class is IPM.Note.Rules.OofTemplate.Microsoft. This item is the actual out-of-office message returned to senders. If you select it and review its properties, you’ll see that the PR_BODY property contains the text of the out-of-office message that the user created. Listed with the same Submitted time, you should also see at least one of IPM.Rule.Message item. This will be the out-of-office rule to return the reply message. If you see more than one IPM.Rule.Message with the same time, the other(s) will represent other rules associated with the Out of Office Assistant feature.
To delete the out-of-office message and rules, select them in the MFCMAPI window, then press Delete. You can choose to move the items to the Deleted Items folder or permanently delete them, with or without the possibility of recovery. (Since these are hidden messages anyway, they won’t be available for deleted item recovery.) Once you delete the old out-of-office message and rules, the user should create new ones.
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Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
