Re: Out of Office Auto Reply

Outlook 2000 is woefully ill-equiped for the job. Urge your IT department to upgrade to at least Office 2003 or any supported platform to achieve the best results for your money. I officially withdraw every suggestion I made as OL 2000 will never be up to handling the job.

--?
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]

Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
reading.

After furious head scratching, Jan Groshan asked:

| I think it's Outlook 2000. No, I don't have a whitelist. As for
| experimenting .... I'll be working at a different location starting
| today so access to the computer that I want the OoO message on won't
| be readily accessible. I'm going to have someone check with the
| Exchange Administrator to see what the settings are for Outlook on
| the Exchange Server. That might just solve the whole problem. Since
| I'm not the only affected by the OoO message not going to
| "outsiders", maybe they'll do something about it !
|
|
|
| "Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]"
| <MillyS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
| news:Ov9igjs4HHA.4712@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
| It all depends on your version of Outlook and if you have a
| Whitelist. I don't know about "all the types of spam" but you can
| experiment to see what works and what doesn't.
|
| --?
| Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]
|
| Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
| unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
| reading.
|
| After furious head scratching, Jan Groshan asked:
|
|| By "exceptions", do you mean I'll have to list EVERY address I do or
|| don't want to receive email from? or is there a generl exception that
|| would prevent the majority of spam from getting through?
||
||
||
|| "Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]"
|| <MillyS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
|| news:ubzIKlo4HHA.2752@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
|| You will need exceptions - and hopefully your Exchange admin has put
|| anti-spam filters in place at the gateway so you don't get spammed at
|| work.
||
|| --?
|| Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]
||
|| Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
|| unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
|| reading.
||
|| After furious head scratching, Jan Groshan asked:
||
||| I can do that .... but how do I direct the rule to only be applied
||| to "legitimate" email ?
|||
|||
||| "Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]"
||| <MillyS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
||| news:elESW2h4HHA.1208@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
||| Use a rule and a template instead. The other item that Vanguard did
||| not mention is the potential for a mail loop that will bring your
||| exchange server to its knees. I have seen it happen and it is not
||| pretty.
|||
||| --?
||| Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]
|||
||| Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
||| unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
||| reading.
|||
||| After furious head scratching, Jan Groshan asked:
|||
|||| I can't say I totally agree with your analysis of why outsiders
|||| shouldn't receive OoO auto responses. In my particular case, we
|||| shared an Exchange email server with another company of which we
|||| were a tenant. We are now moving our offices and our email address
|||| is changing. We want clients to be told "This email address is no
|||| longer valid. Please redirect your email to _____(new email
|||| address)_____." An OoO auto response seems the easiest way to avoid
|||| a deluge of spam being forwarded. However, thanks for the
|||| suggestion that an OoO responses coud be set to allow outsiders to
|||| receive. I'll definitely check with the Exchange Administrator (if
|||| I can figure out who that is!).
||||
||||
|||| "Vanguard" <vanguard@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
|||| news:eQgRl6g4HHA.5740@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
||||| "Jan Groshan" <jangro@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
||||| news:LONxi.18462$eY.4689@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
|||||| My Outlook (I think it's Version 2000) is running on Exchange
|||||| Server. I have put in an auto reply in the out of office auto
|||||| reply section, but I don't think it's working. At least when I've
|||||| sent myself an email from an outside account, I don't get the
|||||| auto reply. But I do get it if I'm within the network .... which
|||||| is useless because everyone in the office already knows I'm not
|||||| there. I need people outside the office to know.
||||||
|||||
|||||
||||| Talk to your Exchange admin.
|||||
||||| The Exchange admin should have configured OoO to *not* respond to
||||| external e-mails. That is, the OoO should only reply to other
||||| users within the same Exchange organization, not to outsiders.
||||| The company should not be divulging that they have provided no
||||| coverage for a missing, vacationing, sick, or otherwise absent
||||| employee. To do so presents a negative image of that company to
||||| a customer. A customer doesn't give a gnat's fart that an
||||| employee went on vacation or got pregnant. They want to contact
||||| the company through that employee but their primary objective is
||||| to actually reach the company. Someone should have been
||||| designated to handle e-mails through that absent employee's
||||| account or have those e-mails automatically rerouted.
|||||
||||| Even if your company misconfigured their Exchange server so
||||| external e-mails would trigger the OoO auto-responder, spammers
||||| are not the ones to which those auto-responses get sent. Spammers
||||| never use their own e-mail address. Spammers use bogus e-mail
||||| addresses or those that they have harvested. At best, the
||||| auto-response e-mail will be undeliverable (invalid domain or
||||| undefined username). At worst, the auto-response hits an innocent
||||| that had nothing to do with the spam mail (and such misdirected
||||| bounces or backscatter are reportable to DNS blacklists, like
||||| SpamCop). Only during the actual mail session between the sending
||||| and receiving mail hosts can the sender be accurately identified
||||| (if the e-mail is relayed then the relay host gets the rejection
||||| whether it handles it or not). Sending bounces or OoO
||||| auto-responses after the mail session cannot guarantee that it
||||| gets received by the actual sender, especially for spam.
|||||
|||||
||||| A company should not be sending OoO auto-responses outside the
||||| company. They will not be received by spammer but they can
||||| afflict innocents having nothing to do with the original e-mail.
||||| Such OoO auto-responses sent outside the company also make it
||||| appear that company hasn't a clue how to reassign their workforce
||||| to accomodate employee absences (i.e., the company looks sloppy).
|||||
|||||
||||| I believe Exchange 2007 can issue different OoO auto-responses to
||||| internal and external senders. That way, they can try to cover up
||||| their inability to reassign e-mail to someone else during an
||||| absence. Since spam filtering at the Exchange server should be
||||| effectively upstream of the auto-responder, the auto-responses
||||| will not get sent to the obvious spam; however, there is no 100%
||||| detection of spam. The number of innocents hit by the misdirected
||||| OoO auto-response would be reduced, not eliminated. Legit senders
||||| will end up seeing the alternate auto-response which is basically
||||| a push-off to a customer which they consider rude, ignorant, and
||||| temporary blocks their ability to communicate with the company
||||| (i.e., they'll have to go find some other means to communicate to
||||| get past the sloppy management of employee absences).
.

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