Question : Out-of-Office problem in Domino to Exchange 2003 migration

At one of our clients I'm working on a migration from Domino to Exchange 2003. Exchange currently uses Domino as its mail gateway for both SMTP and MTA. Exchange mails to the Internet (through Domino) use SMTP; those to Domino use the MTA. Mail flow works without problems, except Out of Office messages: they work within the Exchange Org and to the Internet, but not from Exchange to Domino. The settings in Global Settings - Internet Message Format - Default - Properties - Advanced are:
- Allow out of office responses: yes
- Allow automatic replies: no
- Allow automatic forwards: no
- Allow delivery reports: yes
- Allow non-delivery reports: yes
- Preserve sender's display name: yes

In Message Tracking, OoO messages to Domino have "SMTP Store Driver submitted message to MTA" as the last line, while normal e-mails have 3 additional lines:
- Message transferred to through X.400
- Message transferred out (Gateway) to NOTES Transform
- Message transferred out (Gateway) to NOTES: (/n>)

I've put MSExchangeMTA Diagnostic logging to Maximum for a while and tested OoO but there were no errors or warnings in the Event Log. I've also tried MTACheck but everything seems ok.

Is there anything I can change on the MTA config to allow OoO messages? If not, can I force messages from Exchange to Domino to use SMTP?

Thanks in advance.
Peter

Answer : Out-of-Office problem in Domino to Exchange 2003 migration

You can play with the config files, the TBL files buried in the Exchange program directory.  They are not that difficult, but you might want a test environment to try them out first.

If you stop all queues and then send a test, then one by one turn them on just to get "next step" processing, you shoudl at least be able to see what is the last queue they were in.  Did they go into a queue for the bridgehead but never arrive the other side?  Did they arrive the other side but then disappear form there?  The tracker tells you this tsuff, but I've sometimes seen it "lose track."

Note that the usual sequence for any Notes-destined message is MTA queue on user mail server to MTA queue on connector to connector mailbox (which is a hidden mailbox), then conversion.  This shoudl apply to OOO messages as well.