Out of office notification

B

Bob Armer

I am using a G4, with Tiger and Entourage 10.1.4
1. How do I post a message that automatically replies to my email that I am
away, etc?
2. Does my computer have to be left on?
 
T

t

The best and easiest way to send auto-replies is directly from your
ISP, routing your mail before it even reaches your Mac. Most large ISPs
allow you to manage your e-mail accounts online, including setting up
mail forwarding, spam settings, auto-replies, etc. Contact your ISP to
see if these remote account management options are available to you.

If not, you can do this on your Mac w/o leaving it running the entire
time you are gone.

First, create a Schedule for all your mail accounts that checks AND
sends every ten minutes. Second, set up an auto-reply Rule in Entourage
and verify that it works (you'll want to study-up on creating rules if
you haven't made them before - it's really not that hard). Third, go
to your Energy Saver System Pref. There, select the "Schedule..."
button at the bottom. Now, set up a daily schedule that wakes your Mac
from sleep for say, 30 minutes (or less if you have a broadband
connection), and then puts it back to sleep. This will give Entourage
time to receive and send your mail. If you have this enabled, remember
to turn off the 'password required on wake or screen saver' option in
your Security pref panel.

If you choose to shutdown/startup instead of sleep/wake, make sure your
Mac is set to auto-login your user account, and that Entourage is set
as a Login item (both options are found in your Accounts pref).

The preceding assumes you have an always-on Internet connection (cable,
dsl). If not, you can setup Entourage to dial out and then disconnect.

If you subscribe to any mailing lists, temporarily unsubscribe from
them before you leave. Also, if you receive spam, unless you limit your
auto reply rule to members of your Entourage Address Book (or increase
the level of protection in your Junk Mail Filter), your auto reply will
send mail back to the spammers who may or may not harvest this event in
order to mark your address as a verified working address (meaning
you'll start to get even more spam).

-t
 
T

t

The other problem with auto-replying back to spammers is that more than
likely, the reply-to address has been spoofed, meaning it's bogus
(although the domain portion might actually exist somewhere). So when
your auto-responder sends back a response to this fake address, the ISP
who receives it is going to send you a bounce message. Now guess what?
Your auto responder is going to reply to the bounce message. Then,
depending on the ISP's mailer software, it will send back another
bounce message, which your auto-responder will again reply to ... and
on and on it will go. Now you're caught in an endless loop that will
eventually fill your mailbox with hundreds, if not thousands, of
messages. The same basic scenario can play out with mailing lists,
except you'll make lots of people very mad at you.

If your ISP allows you to create an auto-responder rule at the server
level, they may offer a special vacation rule. This special rule will
keep track of who it has auto-replied to and send a reply only once to
each recipient, thereby avoiding the endless loop nightmare.

But, you can also create a similar special vacation rule in Entourage.


With minor modifications, the follow concept is from Mickey Stevens
(Microsoft MVP for Office:mac):

First, in Entourage, go to File > New > Group, and create a new empty
group called "Sent Auto Reply." Entourage will ask you to insert at
least one e-mail address into this group. Just make something up:
"[email protected]"

Now, go to Tools > Rules, create a new Mail(POP) rule:

Execute, if all criteria are met

IF, Is not from from a mailing list
IF, From, Is not in group, Sent Auto Reply

THEN, Reply, Reply Text...
THEN, Add sender to group, Sent Auto Reply

The sender will be added to the group. Then, if the same person sends
another message, he or she won't receive an auto reply because his
address is now in the Sent Auto Reply group.

-t
 
I

Information

To add to what "t" and Mickey wrote, if you filter your mail with Entourage
or with other methods that work through Entourage (in my case it's
SpamSieve), this Entourage auto-responder will probably not reply to spam
mailers- certainly not to those being filtered out. You should add your new
rule after any junk mail filter rules, and before any rules which filter
mail differently- for instance shove incoming mail to specific folders and
do not process them further- as your Reply Rule may be bypassed.
 
T

t

Yes, good point. And here's the order of execution for the built-in
special "rules" for mailing lists and spam in Entourage:

1. Mailing List Manager
2. Junk Mail Filter
3. Rules

-t
 
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