Applies To: ■ PoliteMail Desktop ■ PoliteMail Online □ PoliteMail M365
Version: ■ 4.9 ■ 5.0 ■ 5.1+
This feature is intended to prevent mailbox congestion after sending an email. Specifically, this feature will suppress certain messages such as out-of-office replies and auto replies that are rule based, as well as soft Delivery/Nondelivery reports. This feature can be enabled by doing the following:
| PoliteMail for Outlook Desktop | PoliteMail Online |
|---|---|
| Create a new Message. Click on the PoliteMail flag button in the Ribbon and select 'Suppress Auto-Replies'. | Create a new Message. Under 'Send Options', select 'Suppress Auto-Replies'. |
Permanent Suppress in Settings
You can also go to Settings > Sending and find a setting called 'Suppress auto-replies Limit' to automatically suppress all auto-replies for any sends going to a number of recipients over a size limit you specify. This can be set by an Admin to be locked or apply globally to all users, and eliminates the risk of forgetting to suppress auto-replies when sending to large groups.
If you are an On-Premises administrator and need to configure suppressing auto-replies, refer to this Microsoft Learn article.
M365 Suppress Auto-Replies is found under the 'Send & Measure' dropdown, but the setting is only found in PoliteMail Online or the Outlook Desktop.
Exchange Online Users
The Suppress Auto-Replies feature works by inserting code into the header of the Message that tells Exchange not to send a non-delivery report (NDR) to the sender.
If you are using Exchange Online, however, Exchange will always ignore the header and send the NDR anyway (this is not the case if you have an on-premises instance of Exchange). When this happens, Outlook will file these into the Undeliverable folder for that mailbox on receive. However, these can be prevented when sending via the PoliteMail Server.
In order to prevent this, the Direct Replies To feature can be used. This will redirect the messages to this address, wherein your IT team can manage how they are handled for deletion.
Suppress Auto-Replies and Metrics Reports
Please note that there is a statistic for undeliverables in the PoliteMail metrics report. By using Suppress Auto-Replies on messages, the undeliverables statistic will not populate in the metrics report, and applying the above solutions should be considered before making suppression a practice.
