Home / server / Questions / 159982
Accepted
Paul Kroon
Asked: 2010-07-14 08:16:11 +0800 CST

Prevent Out of Office Reply For Forwarded Messages

  • 772

I've searched high and low for this, but have yet to find anything. I'm running Exchange 2010, and I have a mailbox set to forward all mail to another user. When this other user has their out of office turned on, anyone e-mailing the first user will get the response from the second user, even though they were not on the original e-mail. I've been trying to come up with out of office rules that could make it only respond when the e-mail was sent directly, or even a different way to do the forwarding so it doesn't trigger out of office. Anyone have any ideas?

outlook-2007 exchange-2010

4 Answers

  1. I had the same problem. To clarify User 1 requires all mail to be forwarded to user 2.

    User 2 has out of office on and mail from user 1 also recieves user 2 out of office messages.

    I found the way to prevent this was in user 1 outlook mailbox, create a rule in the outlook client that says "where my name is in the to box" forward all mails to "user 2".

    When the mail is forwarded user 2 and the out of office is switched on, the out of office message will not be forwarded to User 1 mails.

    The only drawback to this is all mails recieved from user 1 to user 2 state "this message was forwarded" and appears to be sent from user 1. Unlike if forward mails using Exchange management console where you can see the senders address and thast it was sent to user 2

    • 1

  2. you could possibly create a distribution-group with the "user 2" (or forward to address) joined to it and disable the autoreply in MSECP/Receipient Config/distributiongroups/name-of-the-group/Properties/Advanced (option with checkbox).

    I recently found this, but cannot apply in an exchange 2013 environment.

    • 1

  3. The way I've solved this in the past is to not use the out-of-office assistant, but to write my own rule for it. The rule needs to only trigger when the "To:" line contains the 2nd mailbox. That way mail with the To: set to the forwarding mailbox will NOT trigger the out-of-office rule. One of the actions you can do with rules is to reply with the out of office assistant, which should ensure that only one message is sent to each sender.

    • 0
  4. Best Answer

    Although the other answer would work, I found another solution that allowed my user to keep his out-of-office functionality. I disabled the forwarding from the server between the first and second mailboxes, and instead created a rule that forwarded all incoming mail to the other user. This makes the forwarded e-mails appear as though the first user actually forwarded the e-mail, but this means the out-of-office message will only be sent to the first user, and will only be sent once.

    I'd still love to hear any other better solutions, but I'm not sure if there is any other way to accomplish this.

    • 0