Auto response from distribution Group while mail send from external domain

Question

Auto response from distribution Group while mail send from external domain

Nur Hossain 21

Need help for following

Thank You
Nur

Tsottles, James 0 Reputation points

2024-03-27T13:51:14.6533333+00:00

I was just discussing this with my Service Delivery team. Adding a shared mailbox to the DL and configuring the DL to allow auto reply had the effect of all members of the DL forwarding their auto reply to the senders.

What we landed on was to have the shared mailbox be the only member and have a forwarding rule for the former members of the DL. Define the rule to discard responses with standard auto-forward verbiage. This has the same net effect of the DL for the members. The DL now gets configured to allow out of office and the members do not forward the out of office to the senders.

An alternate solution for this, if you are just setting it up, is to make the Shared mailbox the first place the senders send to and have a forwarding Exchange Attribute on that mailbox to the DL. This is not something that we could do because of wide spread nick name caching in Outlook.

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Tsottles, James 0 Reputation points

2024-03-27T13:51:14.6533333+00:00

I was just discussing this with my Service Delivery team. Adding a shared mailbox to the DL and configuring the DL to allow auto reply had the effect of all members of the DL forwarding their auto reply to the senders.

What we landed on was to have the shared mailbox be the only member and have a forwarding rule for the former members of the DL. Define the rule to discard responses with standard auto-forward verbiage. This has the same net effect of the DL for the members. The DL now gets configured to allow out of office and the members do not forward the out of office to the senders.

An alternate solution for this, if you are just setting it up, is to make the Shared mailbox the first place the senders send to and have a forwarding Exchange Attribute on that mailbox to the DL. This is not something that we could do because of wide spread nick name caching in Outlook.

Answer 1

Lydia Zhou - MSFT 2,386 Microsoft Employee

@Nur Hossain

Agree with michev, no existing feature is supported to enable auto reply for a distribution group. As a workaround, we can create a new user mailbox to send the auto reply.

Create a transport rule. When the sender is external, and To or Cc box contains the distribution group, Bcc the message to a user mailbox:

2) Login to the user mailbox for auto reply, and create an Inbox rule. When the message is sent to the distribution group, have server reply using a specific message:

3) After that, when the external sender sends message to this distribution group, he should get the auto-reply message like this:

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Lydia Zhou - MSFT 2,386 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-10-08T08:02:27.233+00:00

@Nur Hossain

Do you try the workaround? Does it work for you?
If you have any questions or need further help on this issue, please feel free to post back.

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Lydia Zhou - MSFT 2,386 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2020-10-12T09:13:05.517+00:00

Is there any update on this thread? Please let us know if you would like further assistance.

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AamirG 27 Reputation points

2022-06-30T03:35:25.293+00:00

Thank you! This solution solved our problem!

Answer 2

Vasil Michev 125.5K MVP Volunteer Moderator

DGs do not have auto-response settings, you will have to add some shared mailbox or similar as a member of the group, then configure auto-reply. If you want to receive/auto-reply to external messages, simply configure the delivery settings for the group accordingly.

Kenneth Henseler 21 Reputation points

2025-02-05T00:33:51.3+00:00
For those not already familiar with the command, using PowerShell, you'll have to connect to Exchange Online Mgmt and run the following cmdlet:

set-DistributionGroup "DG Name" -SendOofMessageToOriginatorEnabled:$true

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Auto response from distribution Group while mail send from external domain

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