in message
It strikes me that the ability to specify which e-mail address you
want your out-of-office reply to reply to, would be a good idea. I
think we all know that replying to junk mail just gets your e-mail
address put onto the confirmed e-mail address list, which results in
you getting more junk mail.
How about being able to specfy that you only want your out-of-office
reply to reply to e-mail from:
1. Your contacts list,
2. e-mail addresses that end in a certain domain (your work domain
for
example),
3. any other useful categories?
Admittedly, I am not using the latest version of Outlook (2000) so
it
is possible that this has already been incorporated into later
versions.
Ciao,
Chappy.
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).
