How do I set up an email auto-reply message?

If you have a distribution group like “customer service” and when someone sends to this group, a reply is sent “Thank you for contacting us, we’ll look into this matter soon”, how is this done??

Sounds simple enough … NO … I looked it up and since we setup a distribution group, there was something about associating the group with a public folder (see link), when following the procedure some weird error kept popping up when trying to save the auto-reply template:

“Changes to the Rule could not be saved.”

From the error, you automatically think “permission problem”, but that didn’t solve the problem and even the procedures to solve this problem didn’t work!

I had to find another way. So this is what we did

1. Create an email account (sales@company.com), because we want to associate rules and with distribution group you can’t because it doesn’t have an email box in exchange
2. Login using that account and configure office outlook as exchange mail
3. Go to tools -> rules and alerts
4. Under “Start from a blank rule” select “Check messages when they arrive” -> next –you can’t do it through OWA-
5. Click Next again and you will get a message “This rule will be applied to every message ….”, click Yes
6. In the next window choose the following actions
a. Have server reply using a specific message
b. Redirect it to people or distribution
c. delete
7. In (a), you’ll get an email message box, write the subject and email body
8. In (b), instead of adding individual users to receive a copy of all emails sent to sales account. Create a distribution group (salesGroup@company.com), add the group in the redirect field. Then add users to the distribution group. This way it is easier to modify the recipients’ list instead of logging everytime and adding or deleting users
9. In (c), I think step (b) automatically deletes the emails in sales account after redirecting them. Nevertheless, this rule to ensure all emails goes to the delete box. This is emptied after specific days. This ensures sales email account size never fills
10. Click Finish

And that’s that If anyone has a better solution, PLEEEAZZZEEE share …

Don’t make the alternative solution too easy, because it took me whole day to get this ;P