I work in a small company. The I.T. manager tells me it is not possible to set microsoft outlook auto reply message for any person outside of our company. This is because in the event the autoreply message sends a message to an email account which has their own auto reply message set "on" that the email messaging systems will continuously send auto reply messages to each other. I find it hard to believe there is not a solution to this problem, can anyone help? P.S. I see on viewing outlook office assistant that it is indicated the auto reply message will be sent only once to each sender, so I'm further unclear of the I.T. manager's statement. Thanks. Helen.

Do you mean that it's not possible to set an auto-reply for your email to respond to an out of company mail sent to your account?

That's not true. If you're using Microsoft Outlook running through an Exchange Server, you can indeed set the Out Of Office Reply option to send a message to each email address sending to your account. When you configure your reply message, in the the "AutoReply only once to each sender with the following text box" you will type the message that you want to be sent while you are out of the office.

The only way that a sender will receive more than one message is if there is an orphaned rule on the server. See this article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;218301&Product=out2K

It sounds to me that what your IT manager is telling you is that he will not enable the OOO (Out Of Office) messages to be sent to internet addresses, which is a very good practice as far as I am concerned.

I have seen an Exchange Server (which I am assuming that you are using as you have the Out of Office option) get into a nice loop, and eventually fall over in a similar scenario as to what your IT manager is describing.

This may be an option that can be set but it is a very dangerous option in terms of revealing private information about yourself or your company.

Being a system administrator I have had to unpick the sorts of mess that these options being turned on can leave behind.

Only today did I send an email to a mailing list and recieved 3 seperate replies from different peoples private email addresses giving me details of personal phone numbers and addresses as well as how long they are out of the office for.

There is also the situation where you end up with emails flying backwards and forwards as different addresses answer replies sent at different points.

In the worst case if you are allowed to set up a rule to forward email to your own private account at home that has a size limit on it and then the limit is exceeded at home the remote system will bounce the email back to your home system and create a mailing loop which will take down you email server and use up any spare internet bandwidth you have available.

I think your IT Mananger is being very sensible not turning on this option and I would not do this in any company where I had to be the system admin for the email systems.

If someone needs to get hold of you then they will send you an email if you dont respond to it then they will phone you up. This is standard business practice. If you are expecting an urgent email from someone then you can setup a rule to forward the message to one of your colleagues and let them deal with it.

Personally Helen I think you should listen to your IT manager and not try to tell him how to do his job.

Does he pop round and log on to bulletin boards to try and prove to you how you are doing your job wrong.

You have not explained why you want to use out of office?

I'd just like to agree with what has already been said. What your IT manager is doing is following established best practice, and is also ensuring that your company is a good corporate internet citizen. It can be useful within an office to have Out of Office messages in use, but having your system configured to send messages to external addresses can cause technical problems, and there is the further issue that a good internal OOO message is rarely suitable for external recipients, and some individuals do occasionally put comments that might be very amusing internally but totally unsuitable for customers, clients or suppliers. If you are going to be out of the office for some time, I would consider it better to notify any key contacts before you go so that they know that you will be away and can contact a colleague.

A further thing to bear in mind is that you should be able to use the delegate functionality within Outlook to enable a colleague or assistant to monitor your mailbox while you are away.

Having OOF replies going out to the Internet is also a good way of confirming your email address to spammers!

I’d like to thank everybody for your replies. See my feedback below.

Response 1:

Good general source of info you recommneded , I’d look in this type of place for answers to further questions in future. Apparently our company’s experience is that in the event there are viruses or incorrectly configured systems at the email recipients end that a problem of emails being sent back and forth taking up valueable space on our server can still happen even if you use this option.

Response 2:

Right now our system is configured to not autoreply to any email addresses.

The loop you describe is what I was (unclearly) trying to describe initially.

Response 3:

Good point about revealing private information What I can confirm is that sometimes I receive auto reply emails from very large multinational companies so there are companies out there who do disagree.

Ther reasons for me wanting to have the auto reply option are as follows:

1) Our company prides itself on quickly responding to client requests. Not responding could indicate we are not interested in a new piece of business. We may not get that telephone call.
2) Sometimes we get emails from new clients therefore forward rule won’t always work.
3) As we can’t “select” which emails are to be forwarded, the only option to guarantee all emails are read when we’re out of the office is to forward the whole account to a colleague. What I don’t like about this option is that sometimes I get private emails.

Response 4:

Ouch !!! but reading what I initially wrote I can see why you could interpret my intentions as you have. I’ve been spending today trying to patch things up with the I.T. manager having shown him this forum!

My intention was NOT to prove our I.T. manager wrong but to help him find a solution. He’s a busy man with many roles.

Response 5:

What I still don’t understand is why I get out of office replies from various multi national corporations some of who I genuinely believe make it their business to do things the right way. I assume from being able to get these auto reply messages that these big companies have come up with a way to get around the various problems.

Response 6:Good point.

Just because Multinational corporations do it, it doesn't mean it's right. In many situations, corporates are the worst, because of their bumbling incompetance and beaurocracy.
The chances are, theres an IT manager thats been telling them to disable OOO replies for the last 2 years, and some jumped up sales director has been overrulling him all the way! Thats how corporations work!

You say you get OOO replies from them, what do you think would happen if you had OOO replies setup to respond to their OOO replies?

The only legitimate reason you offer as to why the forward solution wont work is that you use your work account for personal mail! Thats hardly cricket is it?
Why not get a separate personal account that you can access via the web, to solve that problem, rather than compromise your companies security and public appearance of competance to get round it??

Its a generally known fact amongst IT professionals, that it's simply not a smart thing to have OOO turned on for exactly the reasons mentioned above....

can't you take a hint? :-)

Not all administrators are allowed to choose the most correct option due to internal politics. There is also the issue that not all companies have IT staff who are on the ball and understand the implications of what they are doing.

If you have a relationship with your customer that is so good that you give out your personal email account details then before you go on holiday perhaps you should just drop them an email saying you will be out of the office. Gives you a chance to continue to build that relationship.

If you are dealing with new clients why are they emailing you directly wouldnt it be better to have a sales@ email account setup and get you new clients to send emails to that. Your existing clients should also be encouraged to do the same. What happens if you move to a different job within the organisation then you will still be getting emails for the old job from customers.

This is your work email account why are you using it for personal emails. If they are that personal then you should be getting them sent to a different account. Why not get your friends who email you to add something to the subject line so you can do something different with these emails. Why not setup exceptions for emails coming from friends that filter the messages into a seperate folder and dont forward them on.

The better option rather than forwarding them all would be to get someone you trust to scan though your inbox and they will quickly be able to pick out any important emails but overall I think you need to reducate your customers to send to a sales@ account that can then be used by everyone to make sure new leads and orders are not lost for a couple of weeks.

I always enable OOO messages when I go on safari.