Remove "Out Of Office" from OOO reply?

[JBruyet]

Hey all,

Is there a way to automatically respond to emails without using the Out Of Office assistant? We don't want the "Out Of Office" notation appearing on the email replies. We're using Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2007.

Here's the situation--we're doing an online survey and we want to send a generic "Thanks for your time" message so the person who took the survey knows that we received their input. We DON'T want the Out Of Office message appearing on the reply because then people might think we don't value their input enough to have someone monitoring the responses. Anyway, can the Out Of Office notation be removed from the replies???

Thanks,

Joe B

 

[Scott02]

Your post got my curiosity up so I played with this a little. If you go to Out of Office Assistant and click on Add Rule, you can create a Template that will be sent back to the person based on certain criteria of the message you received from them. For example, in my test of this, if I got an email with the word "test" in the subject line, it would reply back with an email that read "Thank you for your input". If you send the survey with a subject line of "Survey..." or whatever, and if they hit Reply, which now contains the subject "Re: Survey....", it might work with a template based on Subject line. I believe it works fine, when you have the "I am out of the office" box checked so the rule is enforced. But if I understand it right, this OOO Message only goes to a computer once. Repeat emails from me to someone out of office, will not repeatedly send me the notice that they're out. Basically, it worked once for me when testing, but I couldn't do it again to verify. You'd have to get a few people to do it at the same time to make sure it'll work for everyone. Just make sure you don't have any other custom messages typed into the open box for OOO. I did so I got two replies. One with my message, and the one I set up for testing "Thank you...". Anyway, I hope this helps. Play with it and see if it works for you.

 

[JBruyet]

Hi Scott02,

Thanks for the info but you got me thinking--we may be doing this from the web site itself so it may not be an autoreply issue (I always love being included in projects after everything has been decided). I like your template idea and I think I can implement that in other areas.

Thanks,

Joe B

 

[Scott02]

Yeah, well if you have a better or different approach it may be best to do it. I tried this using my own yahoo email account to my work account (Outlook). My yahoo account never got the reply. It may only work with Outlook. Or maybe it'll show up later. I never said it was tried, tested, and true! Good luck with it.
Scott