Outlook 2003 auto reply

[Karen Ross]

i'm not on Exchange. i set up an auto reply for out of office using a rule.
It took me a few attempts to get the .oft template to work. However, people
received 2 replies when they emailed me. I've cancelled all rules, but
everyone is still receiving a reply to any email they send me. where is this
mysterious 'reply' and how can i make it stop? thanks. Karen

 

[TechieBird]

Hi Karen

First, are you sure you didn't set up anything on your ISP side, e.g. do
they have a Vacation option through their webmail?

If you're certain this is generated by Outlook (i.e. the auto-replies don't
happen when your PC is logged off), then it could be that you have a rule
'fragment' that's somehow firing but not showing up in the Rules list.

Try this:

- Make a note of the settings of all your rules you want to keep in case
you need to manually recreate them
- Export your rules to an RWZ file (click Options > Export Rules from the
Rules and Alerts dialog).
- Run Outlook with the /cleanrules switch (search Outlook Online help for
"command line switches" if you need detailed instructions)
- Check the problem doesn't still occur
- If that fixed it, now try importing back the rules from the file you
saved earlier
- If the problem comes back after you re-imported, repeat /cleanrules and
you may have to recreate your rules manually.

Hope this helps!

 

[Karen Ross]

Thanks for the reply. I sent my email on behalf of an employee, and guess
what - she DID get into the ISP's webmail and set up a message yet she forgot
to tell me she did that. she did not think the ISP thing worked and had
completely forgotten that she had done it. I discovered this after about 2
hours of trying various Outlook solutions. I said to myself "she knows
nothing about webmail, but i'll check just in case...." - and there is was.
another employee was directing her into the webmail access over the phone and
she was just clicking whatever he told her to click. of course, no one
remembered to tell me this as i was investigating the problem.... duh.

thanks for the answer, you were right on the money!