Recommendation for Out-of-Office response to the Internet

[ITJam]

We (MIS) have been officially asked by management for a specific (SALES) department to have the capability of sending an out-of-office message to their external (Internet) recipients. Besides enabling OOF responses to the Internet on Exchange server, does anyone have a suggestion, best practice, or a good 3rd party recommendation for controlling this function? We are running ES3K with W3K server, Office Outlook 2003 on the client. Thanks in advance…

 

[Zelandakh]

Just set it globally and forget it. But *do* disable auto replies and auto forwards unless you have Entourage clients.

 

[58sniper]

There are many places on the 'net where you'll find that it's not recommended to be enabled for security reasons, and that's why it's disabled by default. I'm one who shares this thinking.

But there are some business reasons that make a good argument for having it enabled.

Fortunately, once you move to Exchange 2007, you can have separate OOF messages for internal vs. external messages.

Pat Richard
Microsoft Exchange MVP

 

[ITJam]

Thanks Pat, our manager shares the same thinking as you.
I like Zelandakh's idea, just turn it loose and let it go... those guys will then beg us to turn it off when the spam and scam takes over....
Ufortunately, we do not plan on a 2007 upgrade, so we are still searching for a OOF solution...

 

[58sniper]

Spam will increase.

Users subscribed to mailing lists run the risk of automatically being unsubscribed when the listserver receives an OOF message.

Your server must now do more work - use that as an argument to get more RAM and bandwidth



Pat Richard
Microsoft Exchange MVP

 

[zbnet]

I manage a number of clients who have wanted the ability to selectively decide whether OOF messages should go to the Internet or not. As these clients routinely use a smarthost between Exchange and the Internet (usually Postfix), we have a small outbound rule on the smarthost that looks for the string **INTERNAL-ONLY** and discards any message that contains this.

Wwe turn on allowing OOFs to the Internet, but then users are instructed to insert the string **INTERNAL-ONLY** in any OOF text that they wish to restrict from going externally. Now each user has individual control over whether they wish their OOF to go externally or not. It's a bit clunky, I know, but it has resolved the issue to the satisfaction of everyone involved, so it might be worth thinking about.