Out of Office Assistant will not automatically forward external e-mail

[dsi]

I am trying to setup the Out-of-Office Assistant to automatically forward all incoming internal and external email to an external account (AOL) for someone going on maternity leave. We are using Outlook 97 and Exchange Server (v5.5). I have already cleared the check boxes “Disable Out of Office responses to the Internet” and “Disable Automatic Replies to the Internet” on my Exchange server and restarted those services. The problem is that it will never forward external email to an external account. Internally generated email will successfully forward every time. Because it is successfully forwarding internally generated email to an external account, it leads me to believe that the Exchange portion of the situation is configured properly. However, in all the various “how to’s” that I have read, it indicates that Outlook must be configured to ‘Disconnect when finished sending and receiving”. However, I am using a LAN connection (Outlook-Tools-Services-Internet Mail-Properties-Connection) and the check box to “disconnect…” is not available (grayed out) for this connection type. This leads me to suspect that it is not ‘disconnecting’ when it has finished receiving the external email and therefore can not ‘connect’ to send it out because our connection is constant. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[rws]

Try it from the server side. Set up a custom recipient for the home address, then on the mailbox, set that as an alternate recipient.
Another thing to check: in Site Addressing, Routing. See if you have more than one listing for SMTP. This could happen if you have more than one server in your Org with an IMS installed, even if one is not being used. If so, the forwards could be trying to route there (the MTA will not send mail out the same connector it came in on if it sees another route).
I don't think it has anything to do with that "disconnect" thing. The only way to disconnect on a LAN is to close Outlook.