September 13, 2005


To: Grinnell College Faculty, Staff and Students
From: Information Technology Services

RE: Email System - GC Mail Server's Out Of Office notifications

Settings on our campus mail server will be changed today so that the notifications sent by the "Out of Office Assistant" will go off-campus as well as on-campus. Previously, out of office notifications were kept on-campus to prevent flooding of distribution lists. The upgraded email system can now handle the out of office notification appropriately in most cases.


The Out of Office Assistant will send notifications consistently when you are specifically addressed in either the To: or CC: address fields regardless of any other addresses in the To:, CC: or BCC: fields. So in the majority of situations, when you set the Out of Office Assistant, notification will be sent to both on and off-campus recipients when set within Outlook or Outlook Web Access.

The following caveats apply.

If you are addressed in the BCC field only , Exchange may or may not send an Out of Office notification:

A) If the To: or CC: lines are either blank, or only contain a distribution list, but not an individual's email address, it will send an Out of Office message to the sender.

Example 1: PersonA@offcampus.net sends a message To: faculty@lyris.grinnell.edu and BCC the message to PersonB@grinnell.edu, Person A would receive the Out of Office message from Person B because there was not an individual addressed in either the To: or CC: lines.

Example 2: PersonA@offcampus.net BCC'S the message to both PersonB@grinnell.edu and PersonC@grinnell.edu and leaves the To: and CC: fields blank. Person A would receive an Out of Office notification from Person B or Person C if either of them had the Out of Office message set.

B) If the To: or CC: lines contain an individual's email address, and you are in the BCC: address field, your Out-of-Office Assistant will not send an Out of Office notification

Example:
PersonA@offcampus.net sends a message To: faculty@lyris.grinnell.edu; PersonB@grinnell.edu and BCC's the message to PersonC@grinnell.edu. Person A would not get an Out of Office notification from Person C because there was an individual in the To: line, in this case Person B.

Note that in caveat B, if Person B also had the Out of Office Assistant set, Person A would receive one from Person B, even though Person A is not receiving one from Person C, because Person A had sent the message with Person B email address in the To: line, and the rule about the address being in the To: or CC: line applies to Person B address.