We are running Exchange 2007 with a mix of Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. Is it possible to set the Out of Office Assistant so that when OoO is enabled, it sends a reply to every single email the user receives? Also, is there something I can reference that covers the options for OoO such as length of time between replies, etc.?
Thanks!
As far as I know, this is not possible, and there are a number of good reasons for this. For a start people can get very annoyed getting multiple out of office reply's, secondly, what if the users is subscribed to a newsletter or mailing list, they will reply to the newsletter with an out of office, the newsletter mailbox will then often reply with a "don't send mail here, no one reads it" notice, which will be replied to etc until your mail server is using all it's memory to play OoO tennis.
Most of the time I get asked this question, the user doesn't want an OOO message, they want an autoresponder that says "we got your message".
In that case, you should instead create an Outlook profile on your computer with the mailbox that needs the autoresponder as the mail mailbox. Then add a rule that says "have the server reply with a specific message".
CAUTION: this setup DOES NOT throttle messages to mailboxes that also autorespond to every incoming email message. At a minimum, you should add an exclusion to the rule for the mailbox itself. It might also be a good idea to add an exclusion for all emails from your domain. You will also find that you need to add other email addresses as needed if the sender also has an autoresponder.
Unfortunately it cannot be fulfilled by security reasons because it can cause a loop.
BUT, there is a method you can use to fulfill this that can provide you with the same results, by creating an Inbox Rule, create and activate this Inbox Rule instead the Out of Office function and you’ll be OK.
Microsoft Outlook 2010: Create a Rule to Automatically Reply to all new E-mail messages when they arrive.
You can set up Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 to send an automatic response to all of the people who send you e-mail messages. This tutorial gives steps for a department email account.
Now you can close Outlook and log off of the computer. If you ever need to make any changes you will have to log onto a computer with that account and open up Outlook to Tools, Rules and Alerts to edit that rule.