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From: Emmaob on 13 Mar 2010 19:54
My Outlook Express auto reply via rules and alerts will only reply to emails
addressed to my email address and not those addressed to me.

I'm using Microsoft Office 2003. How do I get it to reply to both?



From: VanguardLH on 13 Mar 2010 21:51
Emmaob wrote:

> My Outlook Express auto reply via rules and alerts will only reply to emails
> addressed to my email address and not those addressed to me.
>
> I'm using Microsoft Office 2003. How do I get it to reply to both?

"My Outlook Express"
"Outlook 2003"
So which e-mail client are you really asking about?
This newsgroup discusses Outlook. Outlook EXPRESS is a different program
and has its own newsgroups.

Just how are e-mails going to get delivered to you unless you were specified
as a recipient of that e-mail? They won't. What the sender specifies as
the recipient list is NOT visible to the recipient. You see what the sender
chose to put in the To and CC fields (and won't see the Bcc field).

When sending e-mails, the client compiles an aggregate list of a recipients
listed in the To, CC, and Bcc fields in the *UI* of their e-mail client.
This list is used by the client to create a list of RCPT-TO commands that it
sends to the sending mail server, one RCPT-TO command for each recipient.
If N recipients are listed in the To + Cc + Bcc fields then N RCPT-TO
commands are sent from client to server. No sender ever gets to see the
list of RCPT-TO commands. What is shown in the To and Cc headers in a
received e-mail is that the sender's client put there, and that may not be
the correct or entire list of recipients. When using bulk/spam mailer
programs, a separate list of recipients from the sender's mailing list is
used to generate the RCPT-TO commands and nothing entered, if anything, in
the To and CC fields are used.

So because you are not listed in the To or Cc fields could mean the Bcc
field was used to send you that message. Because it is a BLIND Carbon Copy
field means recipients don't get to see whomever was specified in that
header. However, as noted above, to where an e-mail gets delivered is
determined by the sender's RCPT-TO commands to their sending mail server,
not by the content of the To, Cc, and Bcc fields (which is *data* in the
sender's message). That you get the e-mail means that you MUST have been a
recipient in that list of RCPT-TO commands issued by the sender's client.

"emails addressed my email address"
That would be for ALL e-mails. There is no way to route you an e-mail
unless you are identified as a recipient.

"addressed to me"
How is this different than above? "You" are still an e-mail address to
which the sender specified as a recipient to their sending mail server.

Are you saying that "addressed to me" has your name (or maybe not) but does
not specify your e-mail address anywhere in the To or Cc headers? Your mail
account MUST have been specified for the message to arrive there. That you
are not in the To or Cc headers could mean: (1) The sender put you in the
Bcc field (which is NOT added in the data portion of their e-mail sent to
you); or, (2) You were never in any of the To, Cc, and Bcc fields but were
specified in a RCPT-TO command that the sender's mailing client issued to
their sending mail server.

You never mentioned what you use for mail servers. If using Exchange, the
Out of Office auto-responder is a function of Exchange. If not using
Exchange then you must have defined a rule to emulate an auto-responder. So
it possible you didn't not correctly define your auto-reply rule (you didn't
provide a copy of it here) or you have other rules defined that prevent
getting to your auto-reply rule (because the preceding rules that fired had
a stop-clause) or they induce side effects that alter the message so your
auto-reply rule doesn't apply anymore. Without knowing what you did in the
rules, it's all guesswork as to what you defined.

If you are using rules in Outlook as an auto-responder then you have to
leave your computer powered up all the time, rely on a UPS to keep your host
powered, hope there is no network outage to your ISP, leave Windows loaded
and logged in under your account, and leave Outlook running so it can
actually run the rules that you have defined. It is better to use a
server-side auto-responder when available. If not using Exchange as your
mail server, your unidentified e-mail provider may have an auto-responder
for your account. Use the webmail interface to your e-mail account and
check its settings to see if they provide an auto-responder (might be called
something else, like a "vacation responder") where you can define what text
to send back to the sender. The server is always up and will handle the
auto-replies without you having to leave Outlook running and using a rule to
emulate a server's auto-responder.
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