Hi Is it possible to create a autoreply that covers the complete organization? So that when somebody from outside the organization sends us an e-mail they will get the shared autoreply? It's because we are shutting down the company for half a day and instead of every user having to enable their "Out of office" reply I want to manage it for them. Lasse/Lasse

I totally forgot to tell that we are running Exchange 2007 SP3./Lasse

With Exchange 2007/2010 you can do that using Transport Rules. http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/12/12/431879.aspx Regards Pano Boschung

Agree with Pano that a transport rule is going to be the way to go, but it could potentially create mail loops (not sure there is an option to only reply once to each sender). By shutting down the company do you mean that Exchange will be offline or that users simply won't be working? If it is the former is your inbound mail gateway hosted locally as well or do you use a 3rd party cloud provider? If it's a cloud provider make sure they'll queue the messages for at least as long as the planned outage so that mail doesn't start bouncing.

Create a "catch all" mailbox and a transport rule to copy all incoming external emails to that address. Send your autoreply using Out of Office on that mailbox. Use a Mailbox Manager policy to keep the Inbox cleaned out. The downside is that all the autoreply emails will come from one address, instead of the adderss of the original recipient, but it will eliminate the possibility of a mail loop.[string](0..33|%{[char][int](46+("686552495351636652556262185355647068516270555358646562655775 0645570").substring(($_*2),2))})-replace " "

The company is closed for half a day because we are all going to a conference. I was looking at transport rules, but as far as I can see it's not possible to set up a rule that covers all mail sent to the organization and that will return a standard mail to the sender?/Lasse

Hi Lasse You are right, the only way is to send a bounce message with an appropriate text, which is not really nice, because it is still a bounce message. In this case mjolinors suggestion would be the way, with the downside he noted above. Keep in mind there is still the question of privacy. Even if you use a Mailbox Manager policy to keep the Inbox cleaned out. The question is, do you really need an OOF reply just for half a day? Regards PanoPano Boschung, PageUp AG

Hi Pano I have trashed the idea, it was just a service to our customers because ALL employees are out of the office at the same time./Lasse