Out of office assistant

[juliaatpcgp]

A number of my colleagues use this feature within Outlook 2000, but notice that it only seems to generate the reply to colleagues, not to outside contacts.

Why is this ? What can be done about it ?

This is really urgent because it's more important to let suppliers, customers and prospects know when you're out of the office than colleagues.

They need to use OOA instead of Rules because they need to be able to turn it on/off as they wish rather than setting criteria of dates.

I myself use Rules for holiday greetings (as it does what I need), and in fact I've noticed that sometimes not everyone gets a reply, so that's puzzling too.

I do hope you can advise me towards a reason and a solution.

Regards,
Julia

 

[cmeagan656]

To send OO replies to the Internet you have to have that option enabled in Exchange. See if you can convince your Exchange Administrator to enable it but I doubt that they will. With all the spam these days it is NOT a good idea as the OO reply will confirm to the spammers that your email address is legit.

Cheers.

 

[juliaatpcgp]

Thanks for your reply.

I can't understand why Outlook would put an Out of Office feature in Outlook to tell people you're away from your desk and only allow it to be used for colleagues !

What would I need to enable in Exchange to allow outside people emailing my staff to receive these replies when they choose to set Outlook to "Out of Office".

This is essential and urgent because whilst I encourage colleagues on holiday/long term sickness to use the Rules Wizard (tends to be more reliable in sending these), a lot of people are in and out of the office a lot - often within the course of a day - and switching on/off Out of Office is the only way to ensure those emailing in know they're correspondence isn't being ignored but will be dealt with soon.

I await your reply.

Regards,
Jay

 

[juliaatpcgp]

I managed to find the option in Exchange System Manager to enable Out of Office replies and I ticked the box.

At first I didn't think it was working as I couldn't see a reply when I emailed (from my Yahoo account) a colleague who I knew had OOO turned on. However after sending another one, I got an immediate OOO reply and spotted the OOO from the first time !

However, I have sent a message to another colleague who I knew was on OOO and I still haven't have the OOO reply yet.

I really need this to work for all of my colleagues, and it needs to work all the time for every email whilst they're away from their desk as some of them are part time (working just certain days) and others are away on business a lot of time without the ability to pick up their messages.

Can you help me ?

Regards,
Jay

 

[Gavona]

Sorry, I don't know about Exchange Server etc but I do wonder why you say

They need to use OOA instead of Rules because they need to be able to turn it on/off as they wish rather than setting criteria of dates.

Tools, Rules and Alerts lists your rules and there is a checkbox beside each rule which enables/disables it.
So you don't need to set dates - and can fairly simply turn the rule on/off.

One can set the rules so that the out of office one is listed first.


Gavin