Analyst Out of Office Automatic Replies logged to Work Item Activity Log
jodi_wald
Member IT Monkey ✭
We are in the process of migrating our mailboxes to M365. There is an undesired effect that was discovered for an Analyst's mailbox that was migrated and they have their out of office turned on that send automated replies.
If that Analyst is a member of a Support group that is assigned a work item / ticket (Incident / Service Request), they receive a notification that a ticket was assigned to their support group. Then their automatic reply send an email that gets logged to that ticket's Activity Log. Which in turn will send an email to the Requester.
In some cases that would be good for the Requestor to know. However, when there are others in that Support Group that can take and work on that ticket, the notification confuses the requestor. Therefore, is there a way to block the automated replies from writing to the Activity Log?
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Simon_Zeinhofer
Customer Ninja IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭
We had this issue with automatic replays as well. Most of the time we got these when users got an automatic mail for changing their password and they had an out of office replay configured. But I have to say I don't know if this was the standard Out Of Office Replay or if they configured a rule - The thing is sometimes people want a mail to be sent EVERY time someone messages them when they are out of office. The normal out of office only replies once (a day?) to a certain person when it is configured. So I don't remember correctly.
@jodi_wald : Might this be the issue as well for you? If yes, you could just create a rule in your exchange mailbox to immediately delete automatic replays. This works pretty well for us as we can also sort out these rule-based Out Of Office Replays.
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Answers
Hi @jodi_wald
What Exchange Connector are you using?
Geoff
Exchange Servicer URL with ews/exchange.asmx.
We are not fully Exchange Online, so we have to still connect to on-prem exchange.
OK.
I don't have on prem exchange setup in my lab so I cannot replicate and test but I do not understand how this is happening.
The Microsoft Exchange Connector should not be processing Automatic Reply emails and doing anything into SCSM with these.
I wonder if anyone else has had this?
Is there a setting in the Service Manager Console for the Exchange Connector? Or is it on the exchange side?
There isn't a setting for this as the Microsoft Exchange Connector as well as the open source SMLets Exchange Connector both do not process Out of Office replies by default.
The way this works is that they are both (at their core) retrieving messages in a given inbox of a Message Class IPM.Note which just a regular email. Where as an Out of Office reply would not be IPM.Note. You can read more about Message Classes/Types here - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/outlook/concepts/forms/item-types-and-message-classes
That said, given what you're describing and my understanding of how these connectors work. Something I've seen Exchange Administrators do (for any number of org specific reasons) is create rules that alter the message class before delivery to an inbox. If this was the case, it's possible that an Out of Office Reply is converted to a regular email before delivery thus resulting in what you're observing within SCSM.
We had this issue with automatic replays as well. Most of the time we got these when users got an automatic mail for changing their password and they had an out of office replay configured. But I have to say I don't know if this was the standard Out Of Office Replay or if they configured a rule - The thing is sometimes people want a mail to be sent EVERY time someone messages them when they are out of office. The normal out of office only replies once (a day?) to a certain person when it is configured. So I don't remember correctly.
@jodi_wald : Might this be the issue as well for you? If yes, you could just create a rule in your exchange mailbox to immediately delete automatic replays. This works pretty well for us as we can also sort out these rule-based Out Of Office Replays.
Our exchange administrator created a rule for email to a specific account (the one that generates Incidents) with a subject line of "Autmatic Reply" or something of that nature. I'm not the exchange admin. The solution works!