in message
I am going away from my office. I need an e-mail to be forwarded to
customers
saying I'm away from the office if they send me a message since I
won't be
responding for one week. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
If using Exchange, run the Out of Office assistant. Most companies will
not permit out-of-office replies to be sent outside their corporate
network. That is, other employees will see your auto-reply but no one
outside will see it. Why? Because it reflects poorly on a company that
it cannot manage to have someone cover for your duties while you are
gone. Also, customers don't give a gnat's fart about your vacation and
still want to connect with someone at the company. If your job requires
responding to outside e-mails, like for customers, someone had better be
assigned to monitor and respond to those e-mails while you are gone. If
no one can be assigned then perhaps your company better make
arrangements for you to use Outlook Web Access or some other means for
you to read and send e-mails just because you happen to be "away from
the office" (whatever that means).
If using POP3, use the webmail interface to your mailbox and set the
server-side option to enable your auto-responder. If they don't have
one, you're screwed. You could define a rule in Outlook to respond to
every incoming e-mail but then it reply to every incoming e-mail,
including spam, and you have to leave Outlook running which means you
need to leave the operating system running (and you may need to disable
the screen saver if that disables network connectivity on your host)
which means you need to leave the host running - and all of which
results in a flaky setup. Have a read at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311107/en-us.
