Message Rule - Is this really not possible?

[Bryan L]

The most common request I get of users leaving the office is to selectively
forward all mail from a particular company to a backup employee. It's
simple to forward all mail from a specific email address, but I haven't
found any way to set up a rule that fires for an entire email domain. We
often need this feature, since important mail regularly comes from external
users who have never *personally* mailed us before. Is there no syntax I
can use in the "From" field when creating a rule that will cause that rule
to fire for all email received from the specified domain?

Thanks,

Bryan

 

[Andy David - MVP]

The most common request I get of users leaving the office is to selectively
forward all mail from a particular company to a backup employee. It's
simple to forward all mail from a specific email address, but I haven't
found any way to set up a rule that fires for an entire email domain. We
often need this feature, since important mail regularly comes from external
users who have never *personally* mailed us before. Is there no syntax I
can use in the "From" field when creating a rule that will cause that rule
to fire for all email received from the specified domain?

Thanks,

Bryan

Why not simply add the SMTP address of the departing employee to the
account of the "backup" employee? Otherwise, if you want to capture
messages from a specific domain to a specific employee to route to
another account at the server level, you'll need to script some sort
of event sink or use a 3rd party smtp gateway product to accomplish
this. I suspect you do not want to have to create a bunch of Outlook
rules and leave old mailboxes enabled.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Is there no syntax I can use in the "From" field
when creating a rule that will cause that rule to fire for all email
received from the specified domain?

Sure there is. The "with specific words in the sender's address" should
work, with "specific words" being the domain name.

 

[Bryan L]

Sure there is. The "with specific words in the sender's address" should
work, with "specific words" being the domain name.

Brian,

That level of granularity is only offered in the Rules and Alerts interface.
The interface for creating rules within the Out of Office Assistant is much
more basic (which is a pet peeve of mine; why invent a stripped-down version
when there's a full-featured rules component already there?). I suppose I
could have the user create the rule in Rules and Alerts, but it would not be
tied to their Out-of-Office status and they would have to remember to
manually turn the rule on when leaving and off when returning to the office.
They barely remember to use the Out of Office Assistant as it is, and I
manage enough users that doing it for them isn't a good solution. I've
tried wildcards in the Out of Office rules interface, but testing showed
that such rules did nothing at all.

Bryan

 

[Bryan L]

Why not simply add the SMTP address of the departing employee to the
account of the "backup" employee? Otherwise, if you want to capture
messages from a specific domain to a specific employee to route to
another account at the server level, you'll need to script some sort
of event sink or use a 3rd party smtp gateway product to accomplish
this. I suspect you do not want to have to create a bunch of Outlook
rules and leave old mailboxes enabled.

Because they don't need to receive all their email; just the mail from a
particular company. Permissions have already been set up so they can open
the user's inbox and check for messages from time to time, but until or
unless they do, the message sits there with nobody knowing it's even there.
Forwarding ALL mail is too much information, and manually checking the inbox
creates too much delay and the potential for dropping the ball. What should
be a simple task is turning into a needlessly difficult and complex
situation.

Upon re-reading your reply, I think perhaps I wasn't clear; we're talking
about users going on vacation or to out-of-town conferences, not users who
are permanently leaving the company.

Bryan

 

[Brian Tillman]

That level of granularity is only offered in the Rules and Alerts
interface. The interface for creating rules within the Out of Office
Assistant is much more basic (which is a pet peeve of mine; why
invent a stripped-down version when there's a full-featured rules
component already there?).

Where in any of your prior messages did you mention OOA? Now you're
changing the natgure of your original question.

I suppose I could have the user create
the rule in Rules and Alerts, but it would not be tied to their
Out-of-Office status and they would have to remember to manually turn
the rule on when leaving and off when returning to the office. They
barely remember to use the Out of Office Assistant as it is, and I
manage enough users that doing it for them isn't a good solution. I've
tried wildcards in the Out of Office rules interface, but
testing showed that such rules did nothing at all.

Rules have no contept of wildcards.

 

[Bryan L]

Where in any of your prior messages did you mention OOA? Now you're
changing the natgure of your original question.

Sorry for the original omission. My reference to the OOA was only implied,
as I said, "The most common request I get of users leaving the office...."
I thought people would relate that to the OOA, and didn't think people would
take that to mean, "leaving the business permanently". I make it a point to
try to make my writing as clear as possible, but I obviously fell short on
this one. I'm not changing the nature of my original question, though; I'm
just clarifying what I was really asking in the original question, which was
admittedly vague.

Rules have no contept of wildcards.

If you mean concept, I agree with you in the literal sense that special
characters such as "*" are not used as wildcards in Outlook. Some people
have apparently looked at Outlook's "new" (as of build 8.00.0312) support
for search strings in e-mail addresses, and taken to calling these
"wildcards". Too bad that applies only to the Rules and Alerts interface.
It would be nice to have that support in OOA. Oh, well.

Bryan