Setup an automated response to emails directly from the server.

Many a times we have a generic email account that is published on the internet for customers / vendors to send emails to for making inquiries. The emails to that mailbox are generally forwarded to another mailbox of a real person who will then read and respond to the email.

Depending on the volume of the incoming email and the nature of the inquiry, the response to the email may take anywhere between 1 day to 7 days. In the meantime we don't want to keep our customers in dark and with a feeling that the emails go into a black hole and want to respond with a canned message which would go out automatically only when an email is received from the generic id and none else. This would be because the person may be receiving emails from many people and it is not desirable to send out this message to them.

In such cases, the auto response does not work as intended if you choose the first option "from people or distribution list" (circled in red) and give the generic id as the email address. No email will be sent out to either the original sender or the generic id. This is because when setting up the forward at the server level, Microsoft Exchange instructs the intermediary mailbox to act as a mailman and it does not add any headers to the email. So the final recipients still received the email from the original sender and not the generic id. But in the To: field, the recipient still remains as the generic intermediate mailbox address.

To overcome this, instead of setting the rule to trigger on receiving email FROM someone, set the rule to trigger on receiving email SENT TO someone (in this case the generic Id) by checking the box next to "sent to people or distribution list" (circled in blue).

Once this change is made, this rule will again start working.

PLEASE NOTE:

The reason why it is not working for some users is because you have to enable automatic replies in Exchange Server Manager.

Carry out as instructed about and then make sure this is enabled on ESM:

1. Open Exchange System Manager
2. Select Internet Message Formats under Global Settings
3. Double click on DEFAULT in the Right pane of the MMC
4. Select the Advanced tab
5. Select "Allow Automatic Replies"

Thats it.