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

Hi,

Please confirm if the issue happens to all users when they send OOF messages to external users from Exchange server.

We can close Outlook and receive the message in OWA, then the OOF auto-reply message would be send to external users from OWA. Now check whether the issue can be reproduced.

If all users encourage this issue, please check whether there is any related transport rule configured in Exchange server. Please disable all rules and check whether the issue persists. Also disable any third-party mail related program in Exchange server.

Regards,

Clear it with set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration for the users mailbox, and have them set it up again from scratch.

Thanks LE2Strat, it worked great! Just removed all existing out of office replies for that user in Outlook and then recreated their out of office reply inside of OWA. Thanks again.