XCCC: OWA May Disable External Out of Office Rules

When you use Out of Office rules with Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Microsoft Outlook, the rule may be disabled and the Out of Office messages may never be sent.

You can generate external rules separately in OWA, but when you create or modify a rule, you might disable a different rule that you created earlier in Outlook.

This problem can occur when you use OWA to try to change the Out of Office rule if OWA finds the external rule instead of the regular rule, applies the external rule to the new reply template, and then makes the new reply template active; this disables the originally created template.

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To work around this problem, delete all Out of Office rules, and then use Outlook to re-create them.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server.

This problem was first corrected in Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 2.

OWA reads the first Out of Office rule without distinguishing between internal and external Out of Office. A one-off address is created in the original sender field of a Reply or Reply All message with the display name only.