Out of office reply should not be forwarded to spammer

[Guest]

I created a rule that would delete all the email with the "SPAM" subject from
the Out of Office Assistant option. I noticed that it sends my
out-of-office reply first before it deletes the message. Would it be
possible to execute the rule first (delete the email) so it won't send an out
of office reply to a deleted email?

Thanks!

 

[Jeff Stephenson [MSFT]]

You're using an Exchange server, right? Out-of-Office messages are handled
by the server, not Outlook, and by default will not be sent to the Internet
(though you can enable that).

 

[Guest]

True, but not good enough ;-). The "delete message" commands in my
out-of-office rules are Exchange server-side ones - i.e., they don't require
my laptop's Outlook to be connected to the Exchange server to be applied.
Right now, the auto-reply is done first, followed by any of my rules -
including ones that might send an email! This seems like a defect: if
user-supplied rules are present in the Out of Office Assistant, they should
be applied *before* any auto-replies. (OK, ok, there may be some that need
my laptop to be connected to the server, but the general mail-filtering rule
setup already flags those ones, and wartns me about the problem. Same could
be done here.)

Along this line, please can we have a "do an auto-reply using the Exchange
server's frequency/selectivity constraints" as one of the options available
to people creating out-of-office rules?

The option for the Exchange server to not reply to people on the Internet
isn't good enough - (a) it's only applicable on a server-wide basis, and (b)
it defeats the purpose of an out-of-office message for most of the people I
need to talk to!

Thanks -- john.

 

[Jeff Stephenson [MSFT]]

Well, I'm not an expert on rules, but I don't think that Outlook has any
control over whether auto-reply occurs before or after the rules are
applied - that's server-side stuff. That being said, I know that there is
some effort being made to regularize the sequence in which things happen in
future versions of Outlook, but don't know whether these will apply to
purely server-side issues. You might want to post to the Exchange
newsgroups, who would probably know more about server-side actions.

 

[Guest]

Searching for "out of office" and "spam" in the Exchange community finds this
message, so it looks as if they are alredy cross-linked.

Jeff - I appreciate your response, but do you have any idea how we get the
attention of somebody who *is* an expert on rules?
Thx!
john