O365 Group autoreply to external email address

[VinceMHAW]

Is it possible to have an Office 365 Group (not a distribution group) send an autoreply to an external email address?

We have a committee soliciting emails from the public, and we would like to have a 'received your email' autoreply sent to each sender.  The committee itself has outside email addresses, which have been setup as contacts so they can be included in the group.  Because of this, we cannot use a regular distribution group, since contacts cannot be added to that, as far as I've seen.

But in my O365 Group, I don't see any option for setting up an autoreply.  Is there a solution for this?

Thanks,

Vince

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@VinceMHAW 

Hi, although I've not tested it myself, I believe that the PowerShell command Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration will work with Microsoft 365 groups.

Take a look at:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/turn-automatic-replies-for-office-365-groups/...

and also;

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-mailboxautoreplyconfiguration?redire...

Hope this helps.

[#3]

Hey @VinceMHAW ,

What Peter suggested works great and is pretty straight forward to setup, given that you just want to send an automatic reply. However, this works just as an out of office reply, which means that it will only be sent once in 24 hours to one specific sender. If there is an external sender sending multiple emails he will only receive a response for the first email he sends out.  Plus, since you will be using powershell it limits you to stick to simple text. A more robust solution for your use case would be to use Flows( Power Automate) That way you can control from what mailbox the reply is being sent out, how the email will look, extract attachments from incoming email, send alert emails to others and so on. So you can make your automatic response to an external sender look somewhat like this :

The flow structure would look somewhat like this:

Dive deeper: 

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Power-Automate/Flow-to-generate-auto-reply-email-for-aft...

Thanks

[#4]

@harveer singh 

Oh I like that a lot.  I'm going to give that a try myself.  Thanks for sharing.  

[#5]

Hi @PeterRising, also have a look at AutoReply 365 service for Office 365. 

[#6]

@harveer singh 

The powershell solution fills my need, but Flows looks like it will serve other purposes for me.  Thanks.

[#7]

Hi @VinceMHAW, we are going to release a Windows  application named GroupOOF to manage auto-replies of Office 365 groups. I'll provide here a link later.

[#8]

You can try GroupOOF application now.