Hi,

could you make the following change to the configuration of the Automatic Replies function (former Out of Office Assistant). Our clients have found it very cumbersome that when they send emails to their contact persons and the person in question is on a longer holiday they will receive only one auto-reply that the person is away and after that they receive nothing no matter how many emails they write. Could you change the automatic reply function to send automatic replies to each sender once a day and not once during the person's holiday whose lengths may vary greatly. The problem is that our clients tend to forget that the person is away after a couple of weeks and then get quite pissed when they don't get answers to their questions :)

Is there currently any way to go around this problem? Can we make an automatic query each night in our exchange server to find out which users have their automatic away messages active and then either to shut the service down and restart it in order to clear the auto-reply's internal sent list or to directly clear the sent list from our users meta data without shutting down the auto-reply service? Another possible way could be to check which users have automatic away messages active and then automatically add a server-side auto reply rule to their inbox. Has anyone tried one of these methods before or can you say from the start that they won't work?           

I don't think you can clear the metadata that holds the recipient list for ST_KEEP_OOF_HIST state but if you just flip the OOF state on and off using the OOF operation http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/hh532556%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx or Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638217%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx in the Exchange Management Shell that should achieve what you want.

Cheers
Glen

Hi Glen,

Thank you for your answer. We decided that it would be too risky to try to make an automatic script out of it in our exchange server environment. 

Please could you send our request to the exchange server development team to make this an official function of the exchange server. I tried to Google for a solution to this problem before landing to Technet forums and I'm pretty certain that we aren't the only organization whose customer relationships suffer from the current configuration options of the OOF.

Sincerely

Aki Pohjanen