I'm so frustrated, I could SCREAM

[Cristina]

Here's the dilemma:

I am going to be away from work for 2 weeks. I thought I'd set my Outlook 2000 Out of Office reply. Done.

Run a test: Internal intranet email gets the Out of Office, no problem. But it doesn't work for email sent from an external address.

I call the HELP desk.

They inform me that this is the way they have set it up. I calmly explain to them that it is rude, if not unprofessional, to not notify colleagues outside of the institution that I did receive their mail but won't respond for a couple of weeks.


A very kind woman tries to help me create a rule to respond to every message with my notification. You guessed it, feature disabled.

Then we try to set it up to forward my mail to another external email address which can then send an out of office reply. Ooops, mail forwarding is also disabled.

So, it seems there is no way to let people know I am away. Such wonderful service! They charge us $200/month for this!

I had really wanted to take a break from work email.

Does anyone have any ideas?

If not, just thanks for listening to my vent.

[LW]

Originally posted by Cristina



















Does anyone have any ideas?

Just one: if you get the system to work, remember to unsubscribe yourself from any mailing lists that you are currently on.

[arcticpenguin]

My POW (Place of Work) has a web-accessible e-mail client, webmail, so even if we are on vacation and away from our usual client machines we can still check our e-mail.

If you do figure out how to send an auto-response to outside e-mail, you should probably run your incoming mail through a SPAM filter before generating responses. You do not want to respond in any way to SPAM, because it only encourages them and lets them know they have a hold on a genuine e-mail address.

[davidhorman]

My users are always using the auto-away response, and it rarely causes problems. Except the other day, of course, when one user received a mailshot. The system auto-responded, and he received a mail back saying "You can not reply to this message.", from the same email address...

By the end of it he had 5,000 emails in his inbox and another 5,000 in his sent items, and in what may or may not have been a coincidence, the server crashed the next day.

David

[a_unique_person]

I can still remember the good old days of the first appearance of the PC in the office.

I was a systems programmer for the mainframe computer. The people who got the PCs were so happy, no more being screwed around by those mainframe people, they had their own computer and they could do anything they wanted with it.....

except....

they wanted their computers to be able to talk to the other computers everyone else had.

so....

they hooked up to the brand new LAN, but of course, you could only have one LAN, so they all had to use this one LAN, and it's hardware, and it's software.

Then, it was found that all these PCs needed support, and everyone who had one screwed around with it, and kept on calling up for support after they had screwed around with something and stuffed it up.

so....

the PC support people started closing down the PCs, stopping people from being able to change them or stuff them up, and told the people who owned the PCs what they could or could not do with their PCs.

and...

we ended up right where we began.

[Stainless_Steel_Rat]

If you have telnet access to your mail server you might try making a .vacation file if your server supports it.

*Shrug*

Good luck

[gnome]

Originally posted by davidhorman
My users are always using the auto-away response, and it rarely causes problems. Except the other day, of course, when one user received a mailshot. The system auto-responded, and he received a mail back saying "You can not reply to this message.", from the same email address...

By the end of it he had 5,000 emails in his inbox and another 5,000 in his sent items, and in what may or may not have been a coincidence, the server crashed the next day.

David

A proper away agent will only send one message to any email address and remember it.... I remember before they set that up when this used to happen sometimes...

[Ove]

Let me say this as calm and controlled as possible. For your health's sake: When on vacation FORGET ABOUT WORK,E-MAIL;SNAIL MAIL, ETC. HAVE A BREAK, RELAX.

Then perhaps you'll live till you get older than 50 which is the "Standard" age for stress induced deaths theese days.:wink8:

[Zep]

Second what Ove said.

Send an email to your usual clients/contacts/whinge-list and tell them you will be away and their emails won't get answered by you in that time. You may like to tell/hide your mobile number also (choose one only).

Then go on holiday, not to work in another location. Toodles!

[Psi Baba]

Originally posted by Cristina
Here's the dilemma:

I am going to be away from work for 2 weeks. I thought I'd set my Outlook 2000 Out of Office reply. Done.

Run a test: Internal intranet email gets the Out of Office, no problem. But it doesn't work for email sent from an external address.


I just returned from a vacation prior to which I had attempted to do the exact same thing. Firstly, and the part I don't like, is that you must leave Outlook running the entire time.

Second, you must be using IMAP, not POP3.

Oh, and don't have HTML enabled. Set it to send outgoing messages as plain text, or even though it will send the message, there won't be anything in the body. All of my tests worked fine, but two problems prevented it from working in actual practice: 1) Outlook disconnects from the server after a brief period of inactivity (which in my opinion kind of defeats the purpose of IMAP). I haven't found how to disable this. 2) I discovered that my antivirus software wouldn't permit the out-of-office message to be sent if too many messages were received at one time; multiple outgoing messages were considered virus-like activity. So, do you turn your anti-virus software off while your e-mail program is running unattented? I don't think so.

Then there are the problems of exacerabating spam and the loop problem that davidhorman described.

My conclusion: Outlook's auto-reponse feature is basically useless and not a viable solution.

[Attrayant]

even if we are on vacation ... we can still check our e-mail.

That's a damn shame.