Auto responders

From Mike's Wiki

Excellent software http://www.exclaimer.com/ If you are a cheapskate however, you can use Outlook to set up an autoreply from a public folder. Here's how to do it:

Launch Outlook using the account of someone with admin permissions for the public folder tree. Open the Properties window for the public folder in Outlook and select the Administration tab. Click Folder Assistant. This opens a Folder Assistant window. Click Add Rule. This opens an Edit Rule window. Check the Reply With option and then click Template. This opens a standard message form. Enter the subject and text of the message you'd like to use for the autoreply. Don't fill in a To or Cc. Save and close the message form then click OK. You'll get a warning that this rule will fire for all incoming messages. Click Yes then OK then OK again to close all the windows. In Outlook, send a message to the public folder. You should get a reply back immediately. The reply will use the subject and body you put in the template message.

There is one problem however, when you test the automated reply by e-mailing from an outside account, the sender will not get an automated reply.

Here's why: Exchange knows that spammers target mail to corporate e-mail users. Exchange does not want to give spammers a clue that a particular user is a "live" account, so it blocks all forms of automated replies—including out-of-office replies and automatic forwarding—to senders that are outside the Exchange organization.

To allow one or more of these automated replies to occur, go to the Global Settings icon in ESM, drill down to the Internet Message Format and open the properties of the Default format. Select the Advanced tab. Put a checkmark next to Allow Automatic Replies and click OK to save the change.

At this point, if you send a message to the public folder from an Internet account, you should get a reply.