Creating a Boilerplate Out-of-Office Reply

How can we set up out-of-office replies on the Exchange Server server so that every message to any user gets a boilerplate response?

Typically, users set up their own out-of-office messages in Outlook, and the Exchange Information Store (IS) contains code that ensures that these messages are sent to recipients only once. For example, if John Smith sends you 10 messages, he should receive only 1 out-of-office message. Similarly, messages that you receive from mailing lists shouldn't generate out-of-office replies. Although you can't directly create a boilerplate response, you have a couple of options for sending a uniform out-of-office reply. You can either get users to set up their own out-of-office messages according to your corporate standard (which is easy to implement but hard to enforce and control) or write a server-side event sink that accepts inbound SMTP messages from the bridgehead and generates out-of-office messages that say whatever you want them to say.

—Paul Robichaux