Which takes priority? OOO or Server Side Rules?

[markrich]

We have recently set up MailScanner to screen email sent to us.

Mail identified as spam is tagged and sent to the mailboxes where a rule on each mailbox account looks for the new header "X-Spam=yes" in the header and moves it to the Junk E-mail folder. It was desired this way by my director to avoid the danger of loosing false positives. I think they like to check their spam now and then.

One of the other directors has recently asked me, does that mean Out-Of-Office replies trigger on all inbound email?

It all comes down to the sequence these rules run in, as I see it. Does email arrive in the Inbox first where the spam rule moves it on, or does the identified spam go straight to the Junk E-mail folder by passing Inbox?

If the later than I am assuming OOO will not trigger on those messages. If the message does go to Inbox first, does OOO run before the spam rule?

Help appreciated.

Marky

[markrich]

I think I have answered my own question but not happy with answer.

I turned on out of office.
Sent myself a test email with the spam checking code in it.
Email was identified as spam and tagged by MailScanner.
Out of office replied to email
Server side rule moved it to the junk folder.

Now this is a bit of a worry. We get thousands of spam email a day and half a dozen people use Out of Office each week.

If Scalix is replying to the junk email with an OOO reply we are intentionally replying and confirming email addreses.

Is there a config file someplace to alter this behaviour or should it be esculated as a bug to be fixed? I can't beleive this is intentional, is it?

[William]

Hi Marky,
Did you find a way to stop out of office (auto responder) replies responding to every email?
http://www.scalix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17878 - Is it possible for some sort of rules on the ooo replies?

[BaldBoy]

Is it possible for some sort of rules on the ooo replies?

Yes it is ! But you need to instruct your users and work in synergy with them ...

Generally speaking OOO replies are nothing more the simple automatic replies self enabled by users on their mail account.
They can use either Webmail or Outlook to enable OOO replies.

Using webmail they can either enable OOO reply directly hitting "Tools -> OoO" and switching "I'm in the Office" or "I'm out of office" and entering the reply text (in such way the reply is always sent regardless the content of the message or the sender or whatever) ... OR by the usage of the Rules Wizard: this latter method allows the user to specify "Out Of Office reply" (and it's text) in the "Actions" section, and the conditions that have to be met for the rule to take action. Then the user can easily enable/disable the rule upon their needs. However this method has a problem: Rules Wizard from Webmail does not implement "negative" conditions on text parts so, for example, you can't create a rule wich says "Send an Out Of Office Reply each time a message is delivered in my inbox and it's subject DOES NOT contain the word [SPAM]"

Using Outlook users can also enable OoO replies directly (from OL's Tools menu -> Scalix Out of Office ..). The first thing you notice is that using Outlook you can specify a more complex logic (e.g. reply and/or forward) which you can't using webmail. However this OoO rule has no condition to specify and, of course, to honour.
Even OL has it's Rule Wizard : user can create a rule with an Action set to "Reply with specific message" and an Exception set to "Except when Subject contains specific words" (he can easily set a rule to reply automatically to all messages which DO NOT contain the [SPAM] tag in the subject). However this second method is NOT seen by scalix as a proper OoO reply.

This is where the mail administrator (you) drops in. Using the command line tool sxaa you can (alternatively):

• Let the user create his OoO reply using OL Rules Wizard and then enable the oof switch (eg. sxaa --user "John Doe" --oof y --ref 1000).
• Create the OoO reply for your users (you can send a policy note to them informing that you are in charge of creating OoO replies)
  

  Code: Select all

  sxaa --user "John Doe" --reply simple.txt --not --subject "[SPAM]" --title "Out of Office"
  
  This will create an Out Of Office reply with negative condition.

Please take note that there is also another subtle difference in maging rules with webmail or with outlook: using webmail, when a rule gets disabled, it stays in place with the "Enabled" flag switched off, while in Outlook, well ... it is destroyed.

I think that at release 11.4.6 of Scalix the managing of rules is a little bit cahotic and disorganic (you can do some things with Outlook, you miss some options in Webmail, sometimes you need command line to accomplish the task). Really hope this gets solved in future releases with the option to let the users have same results and same tools regardless their client of choice.