Auto-replies from group without replies from OOO (2003)

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Tearing my hair out!

This is actually in Exchange 2003, running on 2000 server but I am guessing the general idea is the same...

We have the situation where we have an email address for support that several users need to receive the mails from. At the same time, this should send a nice "we've received this" type reply back to the sender. However when support staff are out of the office they set their Out-of-Office so that people mailing them directly know. Currently, people mailing the support address will get any out of office replies too.

What's the right way of doing this?

Currently, we have it set up as a distribution group which has members of all staff required, plus a seperate mailbox that has a "normal" rule set up with the friendly reply.
If we un-tick "Send Out of Office replies to originator" on the Distribution group, the friendly reply doesn't work.

Today, we tried setting the support email address directly on the user's mailbox that the friendly reply is sent from, and also then amending the rule to "redirect" incoming mails to the relevant users. This works but Out of Offices are still received by anyone mailing the support address. (although weirdly, one testing user didn't receive anything!)

Is this simply not possible or am I missing something obvious!?

TIA
James.

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