Originally Posted by elephant

We have identified a problem with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1.4.12 version (MAPI CDO 1.2.1 - 6.5.7638) with Exchange 2007, Exchange 2007 SP1 and the Out of Office (OOF)message getting corrupted causing the Out of Office to stop sending notifications.

If you set the Out of Office using OWA 2007 or Outlook 2007 it and the end-user had BES service, the OOF will initially reply within the first 20 minutes. After 20 minutes the OOF stops responding even though it says it is active.

Additionally, if you view the OOF settings from the BlackBerrry device, it will show the Internal Out of Office message rather than the External OOF message.

Microsoft has published a related article for Legacy clients detailing the issues especially with Outlook 2003. It appears the the BlackBerry is exhibitiing the same problem:

Legacy client and Out of Office (OOF) interoperability
You Had Me At EHLO... : Legacy client and Out of Office (OOF) interoperability

It took several weeks for us to work up sceneries, but have narrowed it down to whether or not the mailbox has the BES service active on the account.

You can test by using a mailbox on Exchange 2007 with an active BES account.

1. Send a test email from an external 3rd party email address after setting. You will receive the normal out of office reply.
   
2. Wait 20 minutes or more.
   
3. Send a second test email from ANOTHER 3rd party email address. Exchange will only send one auto-office reply to each respective mailbox.
   
4. The OOF reply will not be sent.

PLEASE NOTE:
In addition, in Exchange 2007 OOF responses are more secure because of the following two checks:

• OOF messages will not be sent out in response to server-detected Junk E-mail. If Exchange 2007 detects a message as Junk or if the message sender is in the user's block list, no OOF response is sent.
• OOF messages are not sent as responses to Internet mailing lists. Exchange 2007 does not send OOF responses for incoming messages with the Precedence:bulk header set. However, if this header is missing, it is possible that OOF responses may be sent out because there is no reliable way of determining that the message was sent to a mailing list. OOF messages are also not sent as responses for incoming messages with the X-Auto-Response-Suppress:OOF header.

See:

Exchange Server 2007 Out of Office (OOF)
You Had Me At EHLO... : Exchange Server 2007 Out of Office (OOF)


If others could test this and reply back with your results and BES versions and versions of MAPI CDO (mapi32.dll, cdo.dll) located in /System32 and Exchange /bin directories.

Thank you.