Prohibit Auto reply to the Helpdesk mailbox

[Jesper Stein]

Hi. We have had a problem with mail loops, because a mail was sent to a helpdesk mailbox, that replied with a case number, that triggered the users autoreply that triggered at new case number and that just went on and on and on.

Is there a way, in Exchange Online, to stop auto reply going to a specific mailboks?

[#2]

In the case you are describing, no, you simply dont know the address beforehand. You should however be able to configure a transport rule to block OOO replies sent to this particular mailbox, and avoid the automatic creation of incidents. You can find an example here: https://serverfault.com/questions/704250/office-365-disable-automatic-replies-to-spcific-addresses

[#3]

In Exchange, Autoreply is being sent once during the period of Auto Reply (Foremly known as OOF). If I sent an email to someone who is OOF and i get his auto reply, I won't get his auto reply for his current OOF period if i send him a follow up email or new email etc. If you're getting AutoReply from user mailbox everytime, make sure the user mailbox isn't corrupted sending auto reply.

[#4]

Thanks for reply. I found out how to make the rule that will purge any OOF that comes to the helpdesk mailbox. But if I go to my outlook, and creates an e-mail rule, that will reply to any e-mail sent to me (some users do this instead of using Out Of Office), I can not stop the loop.

Any idea on how to identify e-mails that have beeen created from an outlook rule?

[#5]

You may want to configure a transport rule that is applied to the "case created"-mails from your helpdesk inbox to the user. You can apply the X-Auto-Response-Suppress header to these e-mails. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee219609(v=exchg.80).aspx for more information.

[#6]

Inbox rules used as OOO replies have a different message class, you cannot "catch" those via the same method.

[#7]

Why don't you create a trasport rule to purge auto replies based email header?

[#8]

I ended up doing this with rules (in Office 365). One rule to prohibit Out Of Office replies to go to specific mailboxes and another that identified "auto-submitted" in the header of an e-mail and deleted this too.

Only problem is that when the mail come from my old Exchange 2010, the "auto-submitted" is not added when the e-mail is generated by an Outlook rule. But this is good enough.

Thanks for input.