Out of the Office Reply/Rules

  • Thread starter Thread starter Courtney Burks
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Courtney Burks

We would like to set the Out of Office rule to reply to
every email that arrives even if it's from the same
address multiple times.
 
You have to have an Exchange server for Out-of-Office Assistant to be
enabled. You could probably do something similar with an Outlook rule, but
then you have to leave your machine on and checking mail the whole time.

Probably just as well that you don't; any out-of-office autoresponder you
set up is going to automatically reply to everybody who sends you a message,
including the spammers. That's a good way to dramatically increase the
amount of spam you get.

--
Aloha,

-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, OneNote-MVP
http://home.hawaii.rr.com/schorr

**I apologize but I am unable to respond to direct requests for assistance.
Please post questions and replies here in the newsgroup. Mahalo!
 
We do have an Exchange server but everything that I have
read regarding the Out of the Office Assistant is that it
will only respond once per external email address. Can
it be set up to continuously send the Out of Office reply
for all external and internal email? Do you have to use
the Rule Wizard instead or as you indicated, in order to
do that we would need to have the machine and Outlook
running for it to work?
 
You don't want it to reply continuously.

For one that would be annoying -- everytime you send a message to "All"
you're going to get these autoresponders and after the first 6 of them you
already know the guy is away. Hopefully he isn't subscribed to any mailing
lists; bombarding a mailing list with out-of-office replies is a good way to
draw the ire of your fellow members.

Second you're inviting a mail loop. What happens if his auto responder
happens to reply to somebody else's autoresponder? Then they autorespond to
each other endlessly in a sort of "e-mail tennis" that may eventually
overflow your mail server and crash it. Yes, it's happened.

It's far better to just forward this person's mail to an account they can
check, or have the mail forwarded to a colleague or assistant who can reply,
as necessary, to those who need to know that this person is away.

If you really must use an autoresponder I'd use the one built into Exchange
and just let it reply once per address. Trust me on this. :)

--
Aloha,

-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, OneNote-MVP
http://home.hawaii.rr.com/schorr

**I apologize but I am unable to respond to direct requests for assistance.
Please post questions and replies here in the newsgroup. Mahalo!
 
I concur. We used GroupWise with Exchange Server and had this loop actually
happen. There were 9000 emails created in less than an hour and had to hack
the mail server to turn it off without shutting the whole system down (we
were at a Community College).

Once per user is best...

You don't want it to reply continuously.

For one that would be annoying -- everytime you send a message to "All"
you're going to get these autoresponders and after the first 6 of them you
already know the guy is away. Hopefully he isn't subscribed to any mailing
lists; bombarding a mailing list with out-of-office replies is a good way to
draw the ire of your fellow members.

Second you're inviting a mail loop. What happens if his auto responder
happens to reply to somebody else's autoresponder? Then they autorespond to
each other endlessly in a sort of "e-mail tennis" that may eventually
overflow your mail server and crash it. Yes, it's happened.

It's far better to just forward this person's mail to an account they can
check, or have the mail forwarded to a colleague or assistant who can reply,
as necessary, to those who need to know that this person is away.

If you really must use an autoresponder I'd use the one built into Exchange
and just let it reply once per address. Trust me on this. :)

--
Aloha,

-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, OneNote-MVP
http://home.hawaii.rr.com/schorr

**I apologize but I am unable to respond to direct requests for assistance.
Please post questions and replies here in the newsgroup. Mahalo!
 
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