I have noticed a "strange" issue since upgrading our 2013 environment to CU7. We have multiple reports of users who have the exact same out of office reply for both internal, and external senders.  The message appears normal for users within the organization.  But for users outside of the organization (GMAIL, Outlook.com, Yahoo, etc) the text in the auto reply is pre-cursed by a Question mark so they message would end up looking like this for example:

?I am currently out of the office

I thought this could be a Font issue, but I am looking at their auto replies through the OWA interface and that question mark is NOT present in the text.  If you add a blank line before the text, you get TWO question marks before the text.  No idea why it would only affect the outside of my organization setting, but no idea what to do for the issue.  Anybody seeing this bug?

If I do a get-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration username of the person from Powershell, I don't see the question marks in the message configuration either.

• Edited by LE2Strat Friday, January 30, 2015 2:17 PM

It's happening to at least 5 users, and myself included.  We have no transport rules at all in our organization. And we have no third-party mail programs on the Exchange servers. 

Internal replies don't have the ? in the message, even if you use the exact same text for both internal and external.  It's a weird issue and I can't figure it out. 

Hi,

It is so strange. Please remove the OOF configuration in Outlook and reset the OOF settings in OWA, then check whether the issue persists.

Regards,

Editing in Outlook or OWA doesn't change the behavior.  I cleared the OOF message with powershell through set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration then had the users type out the OOF message new and the problem has not re-occurred.  Very strange!

Hi,

This is a quick note to let you know that I am trying to involve someone familiar with this topic to further look at this issue.

Regards,