I have an environment with Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007. An end user is trying to set his out of office message, and after he configures it, he clicks ok and gets the following message: Your Out of Office settings cannot be saved. The server may be unavailable, or your Out of Office messages might have exceeded the size limit on the server. However, when he does it through OWA, it works fine. This is a new one to me. Anybody have an idea what is wrong here?

There is a rules limit that's not very transparent. Does he have a lot of Inbox Assistant rules? It's possible that the OWA rule he's creating is a little smaller than the one he's trying to create in Outlook.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

I dont know what makes a rule large or small, but he is using the same exact text and settings for the Outlook client as OWA, and he has only 1 rule. I wonder if it has anything to do with any Windows updates that need to be applied or removed, or something as crazy as just needing to reboot the server. i have heard scenarios where things just dont work, and once you reboot the server, they work again. I have been unable to do that, but perhaps can this weekend.

Nobody knows that, really, except that some things are obvious. If a rule has, say, 100 SMTP addresses in it, then that rule will be larger than a very simple one. I'm offering suggestions, but I can't narrow down a solution to your problem. The suggestion I make might be testable, for example, the user might delete a couple of rules and see if the problem goes away.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Hi, You can try the following articles: Error message when you try to open the Out of Office Assistant in Outlook 2007: "Your Out of Office settings cannot be displayed, because the server is currently unavailable. Try again later" Your out of office settings cannot be displayed, because the server is currently unavailable. Hope this helps. Thanks Sophia Xu

I have seen many articles on this message "Your out of office settings cannot be displayed", this is not the problem I am having. The message I am getting states "Your out of office settings cannot be SAVED" I can actually get into the OOF settings screen to change things, but it wont save in the Outlook client, but WILL save in OWA.

Yeah, that's why I'm thinking about the maximum rule size. One option is to run Outlook with the /cleanrules switch. That will require the user to recreate his rules, so you should probably document them first.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

We're seeing the exact same prompt coming up; worked yesterday, then today things started borking. Also, we're seeing the same behavior for all affected users - OOO assistant rules won't save in Outlook (2007 or 2010), but will in OWA. I *was* able to alleviate this on an individual account (my own) by using "/cleanrules", but given the unusual onset of this issue, and the scope, giving this as a solution to our service desk doesn't seem like the most politically palatable response. I'm continuing to dig into this, and will post more when I've gotten to the bottom of it. Of course, if anyone has had any insight over the past four months, I'm all ears. Pax -A