Carolyn Bromley said:
Hello!
Unbelievable until I saw this with my own eyes. Our user sent a
message to an external email address and received an out of office
reply 76000 times so far ! It must be a problem at their end but our
user had her out of office on too so it has got into a loop.
Out of office removed at our end and biggest problem now is how to
delete 760000 messages from her inbox. Too many to select all (
operation failed !) but paimfully slow to keep deleting in blocks.
Any suggestions how this has happened and how to delete so many
emails in a time efficient manner.
Thanks in advance
Carolyn
Sure sounds like you haven't bothered to apply updates; read
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=216161. That was an old problem. In
Outlook if you use a local rule within it for OOF (i.e., you are trying
to use Outlook as the mail server to run an auto-responder), it
remembers to whom it sent an auto-reply and will only send 1 auto-reply
to each recorded recipient. If you exit Outlook and reload it, the
recorded "sent to" list gets wiped and you start all over. If the
Outlook client got updated to handle this then why wouldn't the Exchange
server also have been updated to eliminate this continue auto-responding
to the same recipient? Exchange should be sending only 1 auto-reply per
recipient. If they are doing it and you are doing it then you are BOTH
broke.
You might want to check the rules for this particular employee. Make
sure they actually use the Out of Office rule (and that it is a
server-side rule) rather than they made a separate rule to auto-reply to
all inbound e-mails.
Also, it is foolish to allow the auto-replies to get sent outside your
Exchange organization. That means every spam that leaks past your
filtering, if any, will get responded to. Spammers love to know when
they have reached a valid and monitored e-mail address, and will then
hit it even harder. By default, auto-replies from OOF are *not* sent to
Internet recipients in Exchange 2003.
Sending auto-replies to your customers (from the Out of Office
assistant) reveals to them a poor business image. It means you let your
employees take vacations or sick leave and do not have someone else
temporarily take over their responsibilities (i.e., you do not redirect
e-mail for missing employees). It shows poor management if you (or the
manager) cannot delegate e-mail coverage but instead put your customers
on-hold until the specified recipient happens to get back to work. If
someone is going on vacation or extended sick leave then redirect their
e-mails to someone that covers for them while they are gone.
