Exchange Out of office Return Path empty - SMTP relay woes
we have just discovered that our external out of office alerts have not been going out. after further investigation it seems that the Return Path going out on the emails to the external people is set to "" our smtp provider wont allow any email to relay with a return path of "". it needs to have an address..I have had a look around and cant see how I can do what I need to do. I need to configure the return path to have the senders email address. how can I do that ?/thanks
March 24th, 2009 6:57pm

Hi, Whats your Exchange version? In Exchange 2003, the Out Of Office for external is disabled by default. You need to enable it at: Exchange System Manager---Global settings---Default Properties---Advanced---Allow out of office responses. Thanks, Elvis
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March 26th, 2009 11:33am

hithanks for getting back to me its exchange 2007 everything is set perfectly just our smart host wont allow us to relay mail when the return path is set to <> I need to override that value for the Out of office messages. its a bit difficult to figure it out..
March 26th, 2009 6:20pm

Hi, Exchange 2007 sends the OOF reply messages with blank sender<>. Its by design and so far as I know, it cannot be changed. However the MIME headers from field are populated with the sender information and thats why it seems to be delivered from the OOF mailbox. If we check the MIME header we also have the Return-Path information and this is blank <>. (In Outlook, right click the message, choose Messages Options, Internet Header). To work around the problem I will recommend you to allow to relay blank sender in your smart host. Thanks, Elvis
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March 27th, 2009 11:27am

This behavior has changes since Exchange 2003 which send OOF messages as the OOF mailbox. The changes of the Exchange 2007 OOF behavior is because sending the OOF messages with no return path will prohibit the messages to bounce. As per RFC 2298 Message Disposition Notification (MDN) messages should be sent with blank sender. The OOF reply messages are an MDN.Regards,Elvis
March 27th, 2009 12:32pm

ken-doh said: we have just discovered that our external out of office alerts have not been going out. after further investigation it seems that the Return Path going out on the emails to the external people is set to "" our smtp provider wont allow any email to relay with a return path of "". it needs to have an address..I have had a look around and cant see how I can do what I need to do. I need to configure the return path to have the senders email address. how can I do that ?/thanksKen-dohWe are having exactly the same problem. I have another thread (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesoftwareupdate/thread/15dc7582-6eb6-48c5-aa34-ebff631bba4b) running on it.
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March 27th, 2009 3:10pm

Elvis Wei -MSFT said: This behavior has changes since Exchange 2003 which send OOF messages as the OOF mailbox. The changes of the Exchange 2007 OOF behavior is because sending the OOF messages with no return path will prohibit the messages to bounce. As per RFC 2298 Message Disposition Notification (MDN) messages should be sent with blank sender. The OOF reply messages are an MDN.Regards,ElvisElvis - out of interest, why are Out of Office emails designated as MDNs? This almost means that most external out of office emails will never be delivered due to a combination of antispam sw and smart hosts not relaying them. Could this be a design flaw?
March 27th, 2009 3:41pm

Hi Punkii, The MDN may be used by a mail user agent or electronic mail gateway to report the disposition of a message after it has been successfully delivered to a recipient. Its not a design flaw. You can read RFC 3798 for more information: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3798.html Thanks, Elvis
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March 30th, 2009 9:11am

we have just discovered that our external out of office alerts have not been going out. after further investigation it seems that the Return Path going out on the emails to the external people is set to "" our smtp provider wont allow any email to relay with a return path of "". it needs to have an address..I have had a look around and cant see how I can do what I need to do. I need to configure the return path to have the senders email address. how can I do that ?/thanks Ken Doh - I have now achieved this by creating a transport agent that adds a return path to the message header for outgoing OOF emails. Bearing in mind current considered opinion seems to be moving away from allowing external OOFs, I'm not sure if I'll leave it on permanently.
March 31st, 2009 2:42pm

Ken Doh - I have now achieved this by creating a transport agent that adds a return path to the message header for outgoing OOF emails. Bearing in mind current considered opinion seems to be moving away from allowing external OOFs, I'm not sure if I'll leave it on permanently. I have the exact same problem. How did you accomplish creating the transport agent? I cannot get external OOF messages to relay off my ISP's SMTP server as I get SMTP ERROR 553 (must use smart host). I believe it's on account of the blank "return-path" of the OOF emails. Please advise!
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July 10th, 2009 12:45am

Punkii, I would also be interested to find out how you achieved your solution by "creating a transport agent that adds a return path to the message header for outgoing OOF emails." Thanks very much
April 20th, 2011 4:54am

Punkii, we are in the exact same situation. I know this is an old thread, but taking a chance you'll read this. I've been trying to locate specifics on how you created a transport agent to handle this. I'm assuming you created a "custom" one? Would you consider sharing the specifics in how you achieved this? Our SmartHost provider is enforcing the RFC as they should, but Sr. Mgmt insists we still find a way to make this work. It sounds like your solution would help a great deal. Thank you in advance!!
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September 15th, 2011 4:36pm

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