It was just brought to my attention that a user’s Out of Office Assistant wasn’t forwarding e-mail to his home e-mail address. After checking it out, sure enough it’s not working. After puzzling over it for a while I tried setting my own Outlook with the same settings and, what the heck, it’s not working for me either.
We are using Outlook 2000 on Windows 98 and Windows 2000 machines. (Said user has a Win98 and I have a W2K machine.) The OOA is setup to move all messages to a folder setup inside their mailbox and also to forward a copy of all messages to an outside internet e-mail address. The moving to the folder part is okay, the sending of the OOA notification message to senders is okay, but the forwarding part isn’t doing anything. Nothing ends up on the Sent folder.
Now, a change that concerns me as the probable suspect is the fact that a month ago I setup a second Exchange server with the intent to move mailboxes to that new server and retire the old location. It’s been about a month and a half since I setup the new Exchange server. I attempted to duplicate all the permissions and settings. It’s been about a month since I moved the Home Server location of the existing mailboxes to that of the new Exchange server. I changed the Home Server setting on only one or two at first and then watched their behavior for a week or so before changing all the others too. As far as I could tell it all worked out okay. The first Exchange server is still in use. Not quite ready to turn it off and fully test the second Exchange server. (Shorthanded this month; waiting until next.)
I just tried changing that user’s Home Server back to the first original Exchange server and ran another test. Still doesn’t forward to the internet e-mail address. Also tried stopping and restarting the Internet Mail Service.
Could I have missed a setting or something on the second Exchange server that could be doing this? What would I be looking for? Anyone else been there, done that?
All suggestions greatly appreciated.
In Exchange Administrator, Internet Mail Service, Internet Mail, Advanced Options, the default setting is to have both (a) Disable Out of Office responses to Internet, and (
Disable Automatic Replies to the Internet checked and thus turned on. They needed to be unchecked, turned off. When I added the second Internet Mail Service for the second Exchange Server I missed this setting. Once I did that the forwarding worked again in Out of Office Assistant. Thanks for checking on this for me.
). Of course there is the actual Out of Office Assistant which works on Exchange Server and then there are Rules. I have seen many users try to use Rules to dictate which messages get forwarded on. Many users do not understand that Rules are run on the Outlook end, which means that if the user is not there to open outlook, the rule never gets applied.
