How do I stop Outlook Out-Of-Office from replying to certain addresses?

Question

When I am out of the office, if I turn Out-of-Office on, it auto-replies to the automated emails I get from our Bug Tracking system, which leads to our Bug Tracking system getting full of message about my holiday.

With Outlook Out-of-Office, how do I set it to not respond to certain 'From' addresses? I see its something to do with the optional Rules in the O-o-O dialog, but its not that clear how to stop it from replying using the rules.

I'm on Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2003 but advice for any version will probably be useful to people.

Answer 1

To answer my own question, here's a rather convoluted solution I found on a forum, by Brian Tillman (MVP-Outlook):

How do I set up an exception rule in OOA to ignore certain messages?

Open the Assistant.
Click Add Rule.
Put the addresses you don't want receiving the OOA reply in the From feld.
Check "Do not process subsequent rules".
Click Advanced.
Check "Only items that do not match these conditions".
Click OK.
Specify whatever action you want. I usually choose "Alert with", click Action, uncheck "Notify with the text", check Play, and choose some sound, then click OK. Since the rule will fire when I'm not there and while Outlook is closed, the action will do nothing.
Click OK two more times to finalize all the dialogue boxes.

I've tried this out and it worked.