Subject: RE: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"

From: "David Lemson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:46:18 -0700

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2001 9:25 AM
> To: Lloyd Wood
> Cc: A James Lewis; ietf
> Subject: Re: too many "Out of Office AutoReply"
> 
> 
> On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 16:25:07 BST, Lloyd Wood said:
> 
> > message. Apparently the Microsoft stuff is quite hard to configure 
> > well.
> 
> To the point that I've *yet* to find somebody who can tell me how to 
> do it for the offending versions of 'Internet Mail Service'.
> 
> Or is it permanently broken, not configurable, and the organizations 
> afflicted with it need to be sent a 'Your clue must be ->THIS<- tall 
> to ride the Internet' notice?
> -- 
> 				Valdis Kletnieks
> 				Operating Systems Analyst
> 				Virginia Tech
> 
> 

As of Exchange 5.0 (released in 1996), Exchange did not send auto-reply
or out-of-office notifications to messages that contain Precedence: bulk
or junk headers.  Exchange 2000 (released in 2000) also does not send
such messages to messages that contain Precedence: list.  

Both Exchange 5.5 (released in 1998) and Exchange 2000 ships,
out-of-the-box, with the configuration such that out-of-office messages
will not travel outside of the "Exchange organization", which is the
term for the collection of Exchange servers that are managed together.
This means that in order for any of these messages to travel out to the
Internet, an administrator has to make a conscious decision to enable
them.

One major difference between Exchange and vacation is that Exchange has
a capability of letting the administrator determine which "Internet
e-mail domains" may receive auto-forward, auto-reply, and out-of-office
messages.  The intent is to allow the administrator to be able to set a
policy of "no out-of-office messages to random people on the Internet,
but do allow them to go to our certain partners".  The main reason is
for security - you wouldn't necessarily want your competitors to be able
to mail your people and find out you all went to Vegas for the weekend.

In both Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 (we changed the administration
GUI in 2000), there is a "default" setting, and a per-domain setting.
The default setting applies to any domains that are not otherwise
matched.  As I stated above, the default setting is not to allow
out-of-office, auto-replies, or auto-forwards to the Internet.

So here is your step-by-step list of steps for someone to disable
out-of-office replies to the Internet (to change back to the default):

Exchange 5.5:
1) Open Microsoft Exchange Administrator
2) Navigate to the Internet Mail Service (you will have to do this set
of steps for each IMS that you have that sends mail outbound to the
Internet)
3) Double-click the IMS to see its properties
4) On the Internet Mail tab, click "Advanced options..."
5) On the Advanced options... Pane, check "Disable Out Of Office
Responses to the Internet"

Exchange 2000:
1) Open Exchange System Manager
2) Double-click "Global Settings" (in Exchange 2000, this is "global",
so you only need to do this in one place)
3) Click "Internet Mail Formats"
4) In the right-pane, on the "Default" item, right-click and select
"Properties"
5) On the "Advanced" tab, uncheck "Allow out of office responses" 

David

---
David Lemson
Lead Program Manager
Exchange Server
Microsoft Corporation
[email-masked]

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 22:02:03 -0400

David,

Thanks for the step-by-step instructions.  I'm curious, though -
the usual heuristic for most "vacation auto-responders" has been to 
not send responses to any message which didn't include the 
recipient's address in the to or cc header field.  Is there a way 
to configure Exchange to use that heuristic?

Keith

---

From: "J. R. Molloy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 21:00:18 -0700

I usually don't have any trouble unsubbing from a list, but this one doesn't
seem to respond to the usual procedures. Any advice?