Out of Office Assistant problems - Hogwash

Azraeluk

Azraeluk

Azraeluk

Associate
Joined
12 Nov 2005
Posts
669
Location
Doncaster, South Yorks
Hi guys

Here at work it appears out OOA is set to only reply to internal addresses, which for me is a bind as I have regular contacts with the outside world and want them to know I am not going to reply.

I have questioned our IT team about it and got this reply

In order to make the "Out of Office" work externally, changes have to be made to the firewall settings (port(s) have to be opened up to enable this facility). The effect of changing these firewall settings is liable to compromise us to more viruses and spam email, so it is unlikely that this will ever be enabled.
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Now to me SMTP (25) uses the same port no matter what mail is being sent, is this statement a load of old hogwash or for once are they being honest.
 
Sounds funny to me.

I configure Firewalls for a living and have never had to open ports to allow an out of office to work on Exchange for external mail. I happen to know that I get out of office mails from people that the firewall merely allows SMTP in and out of the Mail Delivery System that eventually gets to Exchange Server, where I have configured the firewall.
 
This is due to a setting on the Exchange Server (I assume your using Exchange) that needs to be changed to allow these messages to people outside of your organisation.

See below:

Using the Exchange System Manager, open Global Settings - Internet Message Formats, right click "default" and Select Properties - Advanced. Tick the "allow out of office responses" box. Click ok.
 
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yup its exchange, sadly i dont have admin rights to do that tho, I just thought the whole firewall, virus and compromise parts were just scaremongering.
 
lol just checked, even if they didn't know. just googling "out of office External" would have given them the answer. Shoddy IT team tbh :P
 
Sharlaw said:
lol just checked, even if they didn't know. just googling "out of office External" would have given them the answer. Shoddy IT team tbh :P
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It depends, while it's easy to do on a single exchange server, if you have a complex exchange environment it could be a different matter, depends how mail routing works.

Probably they're just being lazy but you don't know. It's enabled by default so if it's disabled it's likely for a reason.
 
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