MS Outlook 2003 Autoreply more than once?

eddiem74

I have outlook 2003, however the autoreply option only responds once to someone when they e-mail you. This is fine if you are out for a couple of days but when it gets to a few weeks, people tend to forget and you can come back to a big ol e-mail mess.

Is there a way to configure the out of office to reply each time?

Should I abandon the OOO option, and just use a Rule ?

seamus

It may be possible to set on the exchange side, but in general people are reluctant to do these things because they often result in loops which can causes major hassle when they go unchecked.

For example, you receive an email from newsletters@somecompany.com. Your OO replies. Then you receive a non-delivery reciept from noreply@somecompany.com. Your OOO replies. You receive another NDR. Your OOO replies. You receive another NDR.

And so on. I managed to break a company's notes system once doing this. I set up an autoforward from my work address to my UCD student mail address. One day, somebody sent me a 5MB email to my work address, which forwarded it onto my UCD address. UCD were bouncing all messages over 1MB. Not only were they bouncing them, they were bouncing the message and including the entire content of the email.

So work sent on a 5MB email to UCD.
UCD sent back a 5MB bounce.
Work forwarded my 5MB bounce back to UCD.
UCD bounced this 5MB mail back to work.

And so on. Went on four about 5 hours until my mailbox was at 4GB and their mail system came to crawl. I apologised later on...

If you set an Out of office, then the person who mailed you has been informed of your absence. If they forget, that's their problem.

Since you're on exchange, make sure to update your calendar to show you absent for the whole time, so at least if they check that they'll see you're unavailable.

David Michael

What the moose says... it can cause a loop.

I investigated this sometime back.....

They should remember the details you put in the OOO message tbh.

Capt'n Midnight

If you trust someone, you could get then to turn off the out of office message and then turn it on again once per week.

Having a rule is NOT a good idea unless you can restrict it to ONE outgoing message per day. Or a rule to turn on/off the out of office at regular intervals.

A good while back the IEI sent out a mail shot, they screwed up and non delivery receipts got bounced back to the mail shot, which generated more non-deliveries. Five hours later and it was still on ABB

eddiem74

Ok, thanks for your inputs, will take them on board.