We have a distribution group used for some incoming emails and we'd like to set up an automatic reply. You know the sort "this is an automatic response... your message has been received and will be dealt with in office hours etc etc..."

I know you can't do an auto-reply on a group , but one of the members is a user account that is run as an archive of all received messages so I thought I'd set up a rule on that.

I've logged on using this account and created a rule for all messages received.

I've not specified any conditions to match and it warns me that it will be applied for all messages received which is what I want , and set it to "have the server reply using a specific message" , but I don't get my auto replies. If I set another action to happen as well then this gets triggered fine so I know the rule is being applied.

If I add a condition in to the rule for "sender = me" then I get an auto reply when I send a test message but obviously this doesn't apply to other users.

In the internet message formats in Exchange system manager I've ticked to allow auto reply , but I'm not sure if I'd need to reboot the server or start services before that will take effect and it's too sunny for me to be bothered googling.

Should this work , or can anyone spot something I'm doing wrong?

I think that ought to work, but this is Exchange we're talking about.

If you had to change the settings for the message format, then i suspect you'll need a restart to have that happen.

My father asked a similiar question with Outlook and I figured out how to do it on my machine...it replied to all my SPAM and tripled the amount of SPAM I received the next day! Be careful!

Is it attempting to reply to the group rather than the originating account? It's been a while since I've fiddled with Exchange so I can't remember the details, but do you have to specify the original address from the header and reply to that instead? That my be why the discrete mailback to you works.

Sounds like the option to reply to is set as all on the client machines.

The message header should be editable via the exchange server to overide client settings, and/or present the user with an option dialogue.

I wouldnt disable totally, as there are instances where you need a user to be able to reply to everyone.

Buggrit, that'll teach me to wake up properly before I attempt to communicate with anyone

Apologies all - as you were

Oh, I want to know the solution used now.

FWIW I'd have done what Simbo did.