Office 365 Automatic Replies and Email Forwarding not working

[andyt57]

One of my schools has asked me to set up an Office 365 email address which parents/carers can use to report a positive COVID test. The aim is to send the originator an email to thank them for the report, and to forward the report to the senior management team.

 

If I go into Users in Office 365 Admin and open the account details I can select Mail and set Automatic Replies and Email Forwarding. But Automatic Replies only work if Email Forwarding is disabled. Then I found this hidden in the Microsoft site: By design, a mailbox cannot have forwarding rules and an Out of Office notification active at the same time. Very helpful.

 

Their suggested workaround is to leave Automatic replies on, disable Email Forwarding and then go into the Exchange Admin Centre for that account and create a rule to forward the email. I tried that and mail forwarding works but Automatic Replies still doesn't.

 

Has anyone found a way around this?

 

Andy

[robyholmes]

Could you use a rule to PersonA@ to the Cc or To field of any emails sent to CovidAlert@ ? Allowing the email to go to the mailbox as normal and not be forwarded.

 

Or could you just setup the email as a share mailbox and give the person/s dealing with it access.

[andyt57]

Could you use a rule to PersonA@ to the Cc or To field of any emails sent to CovidAlert@ ? Allowing the email to go to the mailbox as normal and not be forwarded.

 

Or could you just setup the email as a share mailbox and give the person/s dealing with it access.

 

I can't see any way of doing your first suggestion in the exchange admin centre.

 

You second suggestion is how we deal with the office@ email account now. The trouble is that they don't tend to notice when emails come into the account.

 

Andy

[robyholmes]

I had to check myself it was possible, but it looks like it is once you click on the 'More Options' text so you get the full set of actions in the 'Do the following...' area.

[andyt57]

I had to check myself it was possible, but it looks like it is once you click on the 'More Options' text so you get the full set of actions in the 'Do the following...' area.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]59696[/ATTACH]

 

Yes, I've used that before but none of those do what I want to do.

 

I think the fallback is that I add office@ to the Covid Team group and they will manually respond to any emails.

 

Andy