Out of Office When Email Sent to Group

We have mail groups that have several recipients and are used to receive email from our customers (eg support@company.com, sales@company.com, etc). We have had trouble in the past with members of these groups turning on their OOO and the customers seeing the responses. This is confusing because it makes them think nobody is going to respond since that got an OOO message. We don’t want to exclude all internet addresses, because if a customer is emailing an individual directly, they would want to know that that person is out of the office.

  1. In Notes 7 we have helped the users enter an exclusion for email sent to a certain address. This feature appears to be gone in Notes 8 with the OOO router service. I don’t see “Sent To” on the Exclusions tab. Am I just missing it?

  2. A much better method for us would be to exclude OOO messages for the entire enterprise for email sent to certain addresses. For example, I never want an OOO message to be sent to anyone emailing support@pt.com even if a member of the group has their OOO on. That would be controllable by IT instead of each user and therefore less prone to errors.

Anyone have ideas on this? Do I just need to do more RTFM? Thanks for any help!

Subject: Use Mail-In Databases

Why not create mail-in databases for support and sales? Agents on those databases would send notifications (with doclinks) to the staff responsible for the respective activities. Since people won’t send sales and support requests directly to those staff, OOO messages will never be sent to them. (And you can exclude messages from the support and sales databases from triggering OOO.)