limiting outlook "out of office" autoreply

Are there so many listservs that you can't just temporarily unsubscribe to them while you're away and then read the messages on the web when you come back?

Also, I believe outlook only sends 1 out-of-office message to a given recipient, so even if you do nothing, it won't be *terribly* annoying.

Actually, as someone who runs mailing lists, it is very annoying. One of my lists has about 6000 subscribers and every time I send an issue out (which ain't that often), I get a hundred or so responses that are all out of office replies. It sucks. Yes, *I* could filter them out, I suppose, but many of the subscribers are in different countries and the auto-responses aren't always in english.

Usually proper mailing lists will send messages with Precedence or List-ID or another header set that indicates it's not the type of mail an autoresponder should respond to. There's no standard, but most autoresponders should be intelligent enough to have a check for something (as well as not replying to bounce messages and/or MAILER-DAEMON, etc.).

Ah, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2919.txt defines this somewhat in fact. It's still not standard or guaranteed to be used by any MUA, plus there's even more headers out there you could use.

If you have a list of the mailing lists from which you receive messages, you can create a rule with the Out of Office Assistant (click Add Rule) that searches for those sending addresses and reacts according to your wishes: send a custom OOO response, send no response, etc.

kcm - there are several lists that I subscribe to that do allow outofoffice-replies to go to the original poster, at least. And I just signed up on a list yesterday that today sent out an ooo-reply to the entire list. So, here's what I did, using the basis of what chrismear referenced: (my changes in italics) Open the "Out-of-office" assistant under the "Tools" Menu Make sure the "AutoReply only once to each sender with the following text" text box is empty Select the "Add Rule" option In the window, put in the addresses of mailing lists and people you don't want to autoreply to in the "From" section. Then click the "Advanced" button and select "Only items that do not match these conditions", click OK to close the advanced window. In the "Perform these actions" box, select "Reply" and check on the template button. Type in a short message that you wish to use as your out-of-office notification. Click OK, and make sure the "I am currently out of the office" option is set.

put in the addresses of mailing lists and people you don't want to autoreply to in the "From" section I have a hunch that this might not work, because most mailing lists send out messages that come 'From' whoever sent the message, rather than 'From' the mailing list address itself.

ahh, how right you are (for non-announce lists, at least). Checked the headers for each list and switched the mailing list addresses to the "Sent To" field instead of "From". Thanks for the catch.