Exchange 2007 Out Of Office Message Interval

exchange-2003exchange-2007outlook-2007

In Exchange 2003 I know that only 1 out of office message is sent back to the original sender if you have the Out Of Office assistant turned on with a reply message.

What I'm wondering is if there is a way in Exchange 2007 to allow the Out of Office message to be sent multiple times to the sender if they keep sending multiple mail messages to someone that is out of the office.

Even if the out of office message was limited to only once per day that would be acceptable.

Best Answer

I believe this is not possible using just the Out of Office Assistant. This was done to stop infinite OOO message loops, bringing Exchange servers to their knees in the event of two people having OOO messages set, with a message being sent from one to the other.

It can be done however, using Message Rules, but this is not advisable (for the aforementioned reason).

UPDATE:

Ok, found a dirty hack that will allow you to do what you requested - however, it is a really dirty hack.

You'd need to customise the script for an individual user (if you have many users, they need one each). Place the script on the Exchange server, and Schedule the script to run once a day. The reason this works is because each time you re-enable the OOA, it wipes the list of people it has sent OOO messages to. You would of course need to remember to remove the script when the user returns to work, otherwise everyday it would re-enable their OOA.

Also, change line 3 and 4 for your environment, and the user in question.

Set objMAPISession = CreateObject(”MAPI.Session”)

strExchangeSvr = "svr-exch-01.yourdomain.loc"
strMailbox = "jane.doe"

strMAPI = strExchangeSvr & vbLf & strMailbox

On error Resume Next

objMAPISession.Logon “”, “”, False, True, 0, False, strMAPI

If err <> 0 Then
    Wscript.Echo “An Error occured: ” & err.description
    Err.clear
    Wscript.Sleep 7000
    Wscript.Quit
End If

strOOOMessage = "Jane is having babies and will be absent for a while.  Please try again after October.  Ciao"

objMAPISession.OutOfOffice = False
objMAPISession.OutOfOfficeText = strOOOMessage 
objMAPISession.OutOfOffice = True
strOOOMessage = objMAPISession.OutOfOfficeText

objMAPISession.Logoff
Set objMAPISession = Nothing

Please note: I have not tested this. You will need to deploy it with a test Mailbox, and do some testing with it.

Wow, I need a shower after that.

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