Auto Replies from a server level

[mlc9]

Am running Exchange 2010 on Window 2008 Enterprise R2. I have a shared mailbox that members of our call center have privileges to add to Outlook. So, since this is just a regular AD account with a mailbox, nobody ever actually logs in to it from a Windows perspective. Employees just add the account to their individual Outlook sessions.

I am explaining this because we want to put an auto-reply to this email address to the effect of "Your inquiry has been received, blah, blah". Someone would send an email to this address and they would receive the auto reply ONE time for that particular email thread. But, they would again get that same auto reply once on each new email. Basically, your standard customer service auto response that is often seen.

I believe this is probably do-able with client side Outlook rules, but as previously mentioned, this account is never up and logged in to. I have discovered a clunky way to do this on the Exchange server side via a Hub Transport rule, but this is not ideal. Said method is just re-doing a rejection message and isn't very pretty.

Can anybody suggest anything else for me from a server perspective? Do I have to go the third party software route? Thanks

 

[ntinlin]

Server-side rule - Have sever reply using a specific message

Rather than add the other mailbox on to an existing profile create a new profile purely for that mailbox and you can go in and set up rules.
Or log into the account via OWA e.g.

https://servername/owa/e-mailaddressOfMailbox

and set rules that way.

Neill

 

[mlc9]

The server side rule(s) is what I am hoping for, but where is that at? A hub transport rule doesn't seem like a very good/clean option because those are really just meant for rejection replies and my concern would be that the replay would carry an error with it as well. If not, can someone please explain this or another server side method?

I am not looking to add any more mailboxes or new profiles and set up rules Outlook rules. To do that would mean client-side rules, and that would likely mean that Outlook needs to be up and running for that account. This is a shared account, and Outlook would never be up and running for that.

The OWA option may be promising, but my question would be whether that still is a client-side rule and require Outlook up and running for whatever rule is put in place?

 

[ntinlin]

Outlook does not need to be up and running constantly for this to work. You only use it as an interface to set up the server-side rule.

The clue is in the rule type 'Have sever reply using a specific message'.

You could also use new-InboxRule within Powershell but that is a bit pointless if it is only for one account, Outlook makes it a lot easier to format the messages.

I wasn't actually thinking straight on one thing however, OWA isn't versatile enough to set the rule you want but both can set server side rules.

Give yourself rights to the service mailbox.
Create a fresh Outlook profile pointing to the service mailbox then open the mailbox.
For OL2010 - select File, Rules and Alerts, New Rule, Start from a blank rule - Apply rule on messages I receive.
For this case you'll probably want 'sent only to me' as a condition then on the next screen you get the action of 'have server reply using a specific message'
Click on 'specific message' under step 2 then edit the body of the message as you see fit and then Save/Close.
Put any exceptions you want on then Finish. Then exit Outlook and go back to your own profile.

I've put all the steps in for the sake of completeness.

Note that this rule will fire any time a mail is received although you can probably check the subject line for RE:


Neill