Discussion on:

MS Outlook Out of Office problem

It appears that half of the users in my office (7) cannot get their Out of Office Assistant to work. We use MS Exchange 2003 with Outlook XP on Windows 2000 desktops. I have checked Exchange and it is configured to allow out of office notification. For the ones that don't work they do not have any rules established. Any ideas are appreciated.

I'm assuming you already know the OOA will reply to a sender only once. When you turn it on, it will send a reply the first time it receives from an individual sender. It will not reply to him again on subsequent messages received during this OOA session.

Can you provide any more information? Do the OOA windows look identical for all users? No rules should be necesary for OOA to work.

Have you recreated the Outlook profile? This can correct many issues such as the one you mentioned.

It's been a while since I've dealt with this problem. It has do do with the way Outook 2000 and XP/2003 handles rules. If you had created rules with outlook 2000 and modified them with Office XP/2003 then I think some kind of corruption takes place.

The way I remember fixing this is to view and delete all rules from both versions of outlook (open your mail profile from both versions). Then create 1 rule from outlook 2000 and try to view it in 2003. It should give you some kind of message that the rules were created in another version. I can't remember what the selections were but it worked after I selected one of those options.

I had/have a problem with the OOA crashing Outlook when a user tries to turn it on. (It will turn on using OWA). It has something to do with a setting file on the exchange server. Run this command on a computer that has Outlook 2003 (other editions won't work). It Starts Outlook and deletes client- and server-based rules. There's a KB article regarding it.


"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\Outlook.exe " /CleanRules

I came across this problem as well and fixed it eventually after a lot of browsing.
if you untick cached exchange mode in email accounts, out of office assistant will work.