How soon are the two messages coming in? Exchange will not send a second
response right away to prevent a looping situation. Let's say someone else
also has an auto reply set up, it prevents your auto reply and their auto
reply sending replys back and forth constantly. See?
"tim_mesd" wrote:
> I have followed the instructions on how to set up an auto reply. It works
> for the first e-mail received from an individual, but I want it to send an
> auto reply for every e-mail received. At the end of the rules wizard the
> check box for apply this to all accounts is greyed out. I am working from
> Outlook 2003 and an exchange server 2003.
> I have followed the instructions on how to set up an auto reply. It
> works for the first e-mail received from an individual, but I want it
> to send an auto reply for every e-mail received. At the end of the
> rules wizard the check box for apply this to all accounts is greyed
> out. I am working from Outlook 2003 and an exchange server 2003.
That's how Exchange works. Autoreplies get sent only once to each unique
sender. This is to prevent mail loops.
--
Brian Tillman
Why would you think that it shouldn't?
That's the default setting in Exchange Server. You will have to ask your
Admin to change it. You may find that they will be very reluctant to do so
because then it will send OoO replies to all the spam you get as well...
Umm... what's the point? I work in an office with 6 other people; I'm
pretty sure they'll all know I'm out of town next week. I want the auto
reply to go out to the people at all of the other 50+ firms I'm likely to
receive mail from while I'm gone. It's unfortunate that will include
spammers. Is there a way to instruct the Assistant to send the auto reply to
anyone in my address book?
>I was afraid that the spammers (and we get A LOT) would get the out of
>office
> message and know that the email address was indeed live. While our address
> books contain literally thousands of names, we can send a message to those
> most likely to communicate with us during the out of office period of
> time.
Spammers either use fake addresses when they send their spew or they use
hijacked addresses so that any return messages get delivered to unsuspecting
victims. There's little danger of verifying your address to them.
Moreover, the default behavior of the OOA is to reply only to internal
addresses. Your Exchange admins might have changed that, however, so it's
best to check.
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]
> I have followed the instructions on how to set up an auto reply. It works
> for the first e-mail received from an individual, but I want it to send an
> auto reply for every e-mail received. At the end of the rules wizard the
> check box for apply this to all accounts is greyed out. I am working from
> Outlook 2003 and an exchange server 2003.
Don't know if you're still looking for an answer, but if you set up a "rule"
from the Out of Office screen, using the action "Reply with", and compose
your OoO message on the template, a OoO reply will be sent out to every email
that you send, not just the first time. The thing is, for the first email
that someone sends while you're out, the sender gets 2 OoO emails (1 from the
standard and 1 from the rule). But every email after that, the sender gets 1
OoO reply from you. Hope this helps!
If you are using the Exchange Out of Office function in Outlook, then that
is the default behaviour. I'm not sure you can change it but I think it will
send one reply every day.
Do you REALLY want to cheese people off with a stream of Out of Office
replies?
>I need to have the same rule. I tried this and I got the 1 standard reply and
> my "rule" message (the two OOO replies). Every subsequent incoming message
> gets no response at all. What went wrong? Thanks.
Automatic replies occur only once per address per Outlook session.
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]
> .
>
jmolnar wrote on 08-Feb-2010:
> Brian Tillman replied near 4 months ago on 15-Oct-2009:
>
>> PMS replied on 15-Oct-2009 to an almost 3-month old thread:
>>
>>> tkolik replied on 07-Jul-2009 and more than 3-1/2 years too late:
<snipped the now 7-month old post>
>>>
>>>> dlw wrote w-a-y back on 18-Oct-2005, more than 4 years ago:
<snipped the ancient thread>
>>>
>>> I need to have the same rule. I tried this and I got the 1 standard
>>> reply and my "rule" message (the two OOO replies). Every subsequent
>>> incoming message gets no response at all. What went wrong? Thanks.
>>
>> Automatic replies occur only once per address per Outlook session.
>
> I have a member of my group out on leave. We need to have an out of office
> sent everytime he is emailed. These are customers outside of the
> organization and they won't remember that the person is out of the office in
> 2-3 weeks. Can't it be set to send a reply to each sender at least once a
> day?
Out of Office when using Exchange as the mail server will send out its
auto-response just once to each sender (based on their e-mail address, not
on their domain). When using a rule to emulate the Out of Office function,
Outlook will send just one auto-response to each sender. For the rule,
Outlook will track these senders while it remains running. If Outlook is
exited and reloaded, it no longer has that tracking list so it will again
send one auto-response to each sender when its rule is triggered. Because
Outlook forgets the tracking each time it is exited, you could use scheduled
events on that user's host that kills the outlook.exe process during the
night and reloads Outlook at the start of the next business day, but you'll
have to use a rule in Outlook to emulate OOF instead of using that function
in Exchange (which assumes your company even has Exchange sending OOF
replies to outsides which, as I recall, is NOT the default).
Even if there were an option to reply once per day per sender, how does that
compensate for their forgetfullness? You can't use software to overcome
their brain farts. If they are truly *customers* then why are you even
telling them that an employee is missing from work?
If this employee is gone on an extended absence (more than a few days), why
hasn't someone been assigned as their e-mail delegate (if you are using
Exchange, an assumption because you never specified YOUR setup)? A company
that doesn't know how to reassign tasks when their employees are absent
looks like a stupid company. The customer doesn't care about your employees
taking vacations, having babies, or getting sick. It is unlikely that they
will only deal with just that employee. They want to contact SOMEONE at
your company. They aren't interested in waiting around until that employee
returns, if they return, or end up dead and never return. If customers are
calling this employee, someone should be made their delegate in their
absence. Making customers wait because an employee took some PTO is almost
guaranteed to piss off the customers and create an impetus for them to find
a solution elsewhere. In fact, I believe the default config for the Out of
Office function in Exchange is to only send an auto-response to senders that
are inside that Exchange organization (i.e., within the same company as the
absent employee). They don't want outsiders to know the employee is gone
and they don't want outsiders to see that the company is inept in not
assigning someone to take over the missing employee's responsibilities. Be
careful when or if you use OOF (in Exchange or as a rule) because it can
give your company a bad image to your customers. If they are potential
customers, obviously they aren't going to wait and will go elsewhere.
NOTE:
Rather than attempting to hijack someone else's thread, especially one that
is over 4 years old (with out-of-sync replies back last October by another
poster that also didn't bother to notice datestamps), you should start your
own NEW thread that describes your problem or need along with the details
for YOUR setup.
I was hoping for a per email solution.
"Gordon" wrote:
> .
>
> This feature could also be used to automate replies to confirm an email was
> recieved by a customer. Per a Outlook 2002 article "Automatically send
> custom reply messages" it states that a template response would be sent per
> email, not per person or per day. But that feature doesn't work, the rules
> follow the same practice as the OoO per user not per email.
>
> I was hoping for a per email solution.
There isn't one in Outlook. The article you read was wrong. Outlook, as long
as the current session runs, will remember the addresses to which it responds
and will respond to each exactly once per session for non-Exchange connected
Outlook. If you restart Outlook once per day, then each unique address will
receive the reponse once per day because a new session will have been started.
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]