Auto-Reply, Vacation Rules, Out of Office Reply, are these good things?
The feature that automatically replies to incoming email was added to email
clients long before spam, viruses,
phishing and other abusive email were responsible for the estimated 80% of all
current Internet traffic. Nowadays the dark side of the Internet is privy to
your out of office information as well as your trusted circle.
- SPAM Concern:
- Auto-reply is fine for a legitimate business contact, but unfortunately if a
spammer gets an auto-reply from you, it will verify that your E-mail address is
valid and may only serve to encourage more spam in the future.
- Most of the spam you receive, you delete from your inbox without even reading it.
Would you even consider replying to every spam you receive? Auto-reply does.
- Security Concern:
- In some cases, autoreplies may alert the criminally oriented of an empty house.
- Other concerns:
- Listserv users HATE auto-replies (always a violation of policy)
- Unnecessary network/Internet traffic
- Looping issues created when auto-replies reply to auto-replies.
- What alternatives do you have?
- Send an E-mail to all of your contacts advising them of being away instead of using the auto-reply.
- Use WebAccess to check your E-mail while away.
- Give someone proxy access to your email while you're away so they can take care of email that needs immediate attention.
- Create an auto-reply rule that only replies to internal users. This limits your auto-reply to a closer circle of trusted users.
Steps to create vacation (auto-reply) rule to internal users only.
- In the groupwise client go to Tools | Rules and select New
- Name your rule for example: Vacation Auto-Reply Internal Only
- Select when event is New and items are Received
- Check Mail for Item types
- Click Define Conditions, In the pulldown menu select From and in the next pulldown select does not contain, now enter *@* in the empty field and select End in the last pulldown.
- Add Action Reply with text
- Select your Reply options, click OK
- Enter your auto-reply subject and message, click OK
- Click Save
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