Outlook Out of Office Replies not working

If you are running Exchange 2003 and you have applied SP2 then your Out Of Office replies may not be sent.  This is actually a hard problem to detect because the Out of Office replies work for internal users but not for external email senders.  So an external user would have to actual inform you that they did not receive the Out of Office autoreply which is somewhat of a Catch 22 since they probably don’t know you are gone. 

The service pack changed some of the settings to make it ‘more secure’.  To enable Out of Office replies for external users go to the Exchange System Manager >> Global Settings >> Internet Message Formats >> Default (or if you renamed this), right click and select properties.  Go to the Advanced tab of the properties page and check ‘Allow out of office responses’.  That should do it.

Windows Home Server Marketing

A few months ago I posted an article on Windows Home Server’s initial rollout here.  Today I stumbled across a hilarious piece of marketing material by Microsoft entitled “Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?”  It’s a parody of many recent children’s books.  Obviously it is part of a viral marketing campaign, and I supposed just by posting it here I’m helping their cause, but it’s very funny and worth checking out.

Below is a direct link to an online version of the “book.”

Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?