"Out of Office" setup for ex-employees

[Losbot]

I'm looking for suggestions, so I can do this the most effective way.

We have Exchange 2010. Ex-employee accounts from way back before I was hired are still in the system. Mgmt has agreed with me that we should delete those old accounts, their respective mailboxes and reclaim the 40GB of space being wasted. Plus bringing our mailbox count down saves us money with our spam filtering service, which charges based on user count.

Their big concern is, being a law firm, they would like an "out of office" type of message to be sent if anyone emails any of these old employees. I was think of creating an account called "Ex Employees" and I'd put all their email addresses in there as secondary addresses, with a generic reply message.

I believe the problem is that, for example, if the courts generate an email to John, who's gone, they'll get the auto-reply but then if they email Jane, it will not auto-reply again because it typically only sends the reply once. Not a great solution.

Any ideas I can entertain? I'd like to ditch those accounts but need some sort of auto-reply that informs that the person is no longer with the firm and provides our main number to call.

Thanks for reading!

[Executioner]

Have you tried to contact your company lawyers for the verbiage to use? That would be your best bet.

[Losbot]

The verbiage is not the problem.....it's determining a way to have the server ALWAYS respond with an out of office message (with the verbiage) that the person is no longer employed there, for all those ex-employee's email addresses.

[b-man1]

you could try a server side inbox rule for that mailbox. there should be a "have server reply with specified text" or something like that. that would bypass the OOO one-time limitation.

another option would be a hub tranport rule that filters for those smtp addresses, but it would only provide NDR messages...i do not believe custom text responses can be used from there.

one thing to keep in mind is the risk of a mail loop if the sending account has a poor OOO implementation. Exchange has loop detection built-in, but we all know MS isn't perfect.

[wvjohn]

I'm guessing is that what you have to guard against is anything from the courts or other firms that requires a timely response. Notices of hearings, pleadings, etc., esp. in older cases. Courts would not be impressed by the excuse "we responded with a (s)he's no longer with the firm" email response

The courts around here were very slow implementing electronic filings, and were just getting into it by the time I retired.

That said, I think you have start with the idea that the supervising attorneys are responsible for making sure that appropriate action is taken on things requiring action. I know that when we would receive a faxed notice of hearing on some old case where the attorney was gone, it would be assigned to someone else covering that area.

So the question is how to separate the important stuff from the rest - CLE solicitations and all that garbage, not to mention all the other stuff that got targeted to a particular email account whether it was work related or not.

Assuming you're talking about attorney accounts, the only thing that occurs to me is to 1) aggregate all the emails from the former employees in one place for review 2) weed out all the crap manually (I know that's a pain, but otherwise you'd be leaving yourself wide open to the question - "you mean nobody actually looked at this stuff-wtf! ), and forward everything that looks important to the supervising attorneys for review. They can then say "don't send us any more stuff from "XYZ" " and you're covered. You mail be able to filter some of the obvious email origins out, like CLE providers and pronlords , but I'm not sure you could create of an list of originating email origins to only be included - there's always going to be a new law firm or possible court email origin.