Out of office assistant in OWA 2003 is not working

[stergiosnik]

Hello.

I noticed that the OWA out of office assistant although is enabled for a user it is not working.

Actually, it works only for the first time. What I mean is that
- I created a new mailbox in Exchange 2003
- I logged on to the OWA interface and set the out of office assistant to be "out of office"
- I sent an email message and I got a reply "out of office"
- I sent a 2nd message and I did not get the "ouf of office" reply.
- I used another email account to send email to that particular user and again did get the out of office reply

That's why I concluded that it worked only for the first message that I sent. All the other messages that I tried to sent did not get the "out of office" reply.

This problem affects all internal users. If an internal user sets the out of office option then another internal user if he tries to send email to him/her then will not receive the out office reply from that particular user.

Generally, I think that the OWA out office feature sometimes works and sometimes does not work. The same problem I had in Exchange 5.5 and now after the upgrade to Exchange 2003 the same problem occurs.

It looks strange. For some reason the mailbox counts the replies that it will send and if it sends the 1st one then it stops sending any more replies. Any ideas what is the cause of the problem?

Thank you in advance.

Stergios

 

[cmeagan656]

I believe that it is by design that the Out of Office Assistant works only on the first message sent from each email address. After the first message another Out of Office message won't be sent to the same sender until the user turns the OOA off and then back on again.

Think about it, if two users have OOA turned on at the same time there will an endless loop of OOA messages going back and forth clogging both users' inboxes and any mail servers involved.

 

[Zelandakh]

Yes, this is done by design.