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The sales team wants to automatically send out a reply to all senders who contact their group mailbox. Something saying "Hi, thanks for contacting us, we will get back to you in 48 hours."

After some searching, I found I could:

  • Create an Out of Office response - drawback: only once per sender
  • Create an Out of Office rule to respond to all e-mails - drawback: infinite mail loops, replies to spammers as well, risk of getting on blocklists; Also, this sends a mandatory Out Of Office mail once per sender, and only then sends my template
  • Create a simple Rule to reply to emails - Can only be client-side, useless for me

These (1, 2) threads here didn't really have a solution either.

Any ideas?

Any tricky way to get out of loops? Maybe maximize emails sent per hour from the address?

Using Office 365, Exchange Online.

2 Answers 2

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Why not just use Exchange Transport Rules? This way you can restrict the action to required messages only (say, incoming from outside the organization to avoid loops). For action you can specify "send rejection message to sender with enhanced status code".

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  • Oh, that "send rejection message" is a good one! I'll experiment with it. It still won't avoid loops if the sender is sending auto-replies too, no? E.g. an automated newsletter service, automatically replying to all incoming mail with "Please don't respond to this mailing list." This could induce an infinite ping-pong.
    – vacip
    Jul 17, 2016 at 18:18
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You can create a power shell script to reset the Out of Office response as frequently as you'd like. Take a look at this. (I haven't tested this myself)

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  • This looks promising, I'll look into it. Thanks! The drawback of the OoO message is the lack of inline image support...
    – vacip
    Jul 17, 2016 at 18:19

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