Following my recent column on using Out of Office replies, Dan asked "My company just switched from Notes R5 to Outlook 2000/Exchange 5.5, and so far the only feature I really miss is Notes' option to only send out of office autoreplies to people within the organization. I can think of a few kludgey ways to handle this in Outlook, but I was hoping there's an elegant way. So far none of the trainers who were brought in had any good ideas."

The easiest way to handle this is on the Exchange server. Your Exchange administrator can disable Out of Office (OOF) Replies, Automatic Replies and Display Names to the Internet from Exchange 5.5's Internet Mail Connector. The global options are accessible from the Internet Mail tab, Advanced options button. Word wrap settings for non-MIME messages and Rich Text formatting (RTF) options for messages sent to Internet addresses are set using this dialog as well. The default setting is not to send OOF or automatic replies to any Internet addresses, which explains why Out of Office Replies may not appear to work.

Using the standard settings, it's an all or nothing proposition--either every sender with an Internet address gets an autoreply or no one does. You can fine-tune these settings if you need to send autoreplies to some domains and not others. For example, if your company is involved in a project with 3M you might want to have OOFs sent to people with email addresses at 3M but not to anyone else. On the other hand, you may want to send autoreplies to everyone except people using addresses from free email domains, such as Hotmail and Yahoo. The Exchange administrator sets this up using the E-Mail Domain button on the Internet Mail tab. In addition to setting the Advanced options for replies, the administrator can control the size of messages sent to specific domains.

If you are using Exchange 2000 server, these options in the Exchange System Manager console, under Global Settings, Internet Message Formats. Exchange 2000 offers additional configuration options, including blocking read receipts and forwards to Internet addresses.

When these options are set on the Exchange Server, they're applied to all users in your organization. It's not something that individual users can set up, you need to rely on the Exchange administrator to configure the settings. If your administrator is unwilling to configure autoreplies by domain and you want to control who gets autoreplies, you'll need to use Rules Wizard to create autoreplies, instead of the Out of Office Assistant.

[Here's a tip within a tip: We originally called this message "Controlling Out of Office Replies", but our list manager rejected it because "Out of Office" is often considered a "trigger text" for vacation responses. So, when you're sending a message, use care how you assign subjects. Some may be filtered and you might not even know it. It took us a few days to figure out where this message went... which is why it's getting to you a bit late. -- Ed.]