Email Forwarding

I have tried to forward emails to a email pager (and other email addresses) using the Out-Of Office assistant in Outlook 2000. The out of office message is returned to the sender but it does not forward to the email to the address specified. I have also tried to use the in box assistant and it too did not forward. I have downloaded a demo for a third party software and it worked. We are running Exchange 5.5 with Outlook 2000 as the client. Can anyone give me any clues as to why emails are not forwarding using the Outlook assistants?