Out of Office Replies are Evil

The OoOF of Lotus Notes works the right way. You can opionally set it to respond to only internal email, i.e., don't respond to email originating outside the company (e.g., SPAM, newsletters, etc.) so it notifies co-workers once. Sadly, Outlook doesn't have that feature so you can't keep OoO Message internal and thus, the feature is not very useful.

Many years ago a mail storm occurred on our mail server for the exact reasons cited in Leo's article.

The lead engineer on our program had activated an email rule to forward all messages he received to the entire engineering staff when the subject line of the message contained certain key words. That produced an out-of-office reply from one of the recipients of the auto-forwarded message, which induced another auto-forward to the engineering distro list, which induced another OOO reply. The ensuing mail storm took down the server.

Couple years ago I was out for surgery and decided to forward my Notes mail from work to my home email. Used my personal address shortcut for my home email address. Notes 'autocompleted' my name and forwarded all of my mail to an employee at our installation in France. MONTHS later I was copied on an email from her supervisor to our corporate IT folks, asking who I am and why am I forwarding so much email to her. Don't I feel like a dope. She got a chuckle when I explained it, I felt so bad for her. Never used oof again.

I'm not sure of the "send-only-ONCE" rule, because people may have forgotten the original response, or might wish to check whether you are STILL out. An alternative might be to set the thing up to send a response to any given recipient no more often than once in 24 hours. This will kill any mail loops, but will still provide functionality.

Interestingly, the ancient Unix "vacation" command (remember that?) provided this functionality, with a little fudging. :)

A further issue with OoO's is that all too often, there's never ANY follow-up to one's original enquiry - which drives me nuts! It seems that when the suntanned OoO originator gets back from the Bahamas, he simply bins all the emails that piled up while he was away - apparently assuming a bot (or the fairies?) sorted it all out in his absence. Whatever happened to common courtesy in business?

Follow on to my Oct 2005 comment, apparently Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 will now do what Notes did years ago, have the option to only send OoO internally. Haven't used it yet (we're still Exchange 2003) but at least there's hope.

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Geoff: I think that particular aspect of common courtesy
gets lost in the email-overload that often piles up while
people are away from the office. I know once I get an OOF I
*assume* that the person did NOT get the message, and that
it's on me to resent some time after they return.

Leo

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Exchange 2003 SP2 has the functionality to only send internally. We use have that setting enabled. It's located under Global Settings -> Internet Message Formats -> Advanced. Uncheck "Allow out of office responses"

I have never understood why the out of office assistant can't simply only reply to emails that successfully make it through my spam filter. Out of office assistant seems to reply to any and everything.

Out of office assistant is only available if you are hooked up to a Microsoft Exchange server. If you are not you can emulate it using rules, and you can also set the rule to respond to mailing lists and only reply once to each sender.

I found an easy to understand example on how to do this here: http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microsoft/outlook/send-out-of-office-response-outlook-2007-exchange-server/

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