Outof Office Doesn't Work

[circulent]

We are running Exchange 2003 with Outlook 2003 clients. What's odd is that
after enabling Out of Office in a client, no replies get sent out at all. I
looked at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=297281 but this KB article
doesn't seem to apply to Exchange 2003.

Thoughts?

 

[Roady [MVP]]

By secure default Exchange doesn't automatically reply to the Internet.
See http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/automaticreply.htm

 

[Bruno]

I believe I have this same problem. I have maybe 3 mailboxes out of about 50
that will not send out of office messages. Their out of office messages did
work at one time, then suddenly stopped.

I know that Outlook remembers which email addresses it has sent an out of
office message to so that it will only send the message once. It seems that
Outlook thinks that it has already sent the message to any address that comes
in.

I've tried repairing Outlook, reinstalling, repairing the ost in the user
profile, nothing has worked. The only thing I don't think I've tried is
recreating the mailbox in Exchange.

My workaround is to set up a template with the out of office message, then
have the out of office assistant send the template in response to all
incoming messages. However, the users are unable to learn to change the
template on their own, so I have monitor when they're out, then go into their
mailbox and change it.

Mike