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Out of Office - Send Full Copy to deputy

Thomas Hampel
 9 August 2015

Summer time, vacation time... You have enabled Out of Office notification, so why would you want to duplicate inbound mails?
Lets say you really are offline and you want your deputy / stand-in to take care of new mails, what options do you have?
In best case we want a deputy to receive a copy of each mail while keeping the original mail in your inbox.

Delegating Access
A first option is delegating access to your mail - this will grant read access to all your data and your deputy wont get notified on new mails.
Another option is to just forward all mails to your deputy by defining a forwarding address in the person document:
Image:Out of Office - Send Full Copy to deputy
This is not a good idea for people who want to see what happened while they were out because mails will just be forwarded. You wont get any mail in your inbox this way.
It might not even be an option as some organizations do not allow users to edit the person document.

Mail Rules
Another option is to use mail rules in your Notes client to send a copy of each inbound mail to somebody else. This can be done by creating a new rule which applies to all documents...
Image:Out of Office - Send Full Copy to deputy
and defining a recipient of your choice --- in this example its "firstname.lastname@domain.com"
Image:Out of Office - Send Full Copy to deputy
Works like a charm, but what if your Administrator has disabled user rules mail forwarding in the configuration document of your server?
Image:Out of Office - Send Full Copy to deputy
...or even took more drastic measures like modifying your mail template to not even show the option "Send Fully Copy to..:" ?

Agents
You could look into writing an agent that runs on the server, but no Domino Admin should allow users to run scheduled agents on the mail server.
So trying to create an agent in your mail file will most likely end up with "You are not authorized to use agents in this database"
Image:Out of Office - Send Full Copy to deputy

Duplicate Mails (with help of your Domino Administrator)
Since you have rewarded your administrator recently for keeping your computers running you'll get friendly support for the following configuratoin:

What you need to do:
1.) Create a Mail-In Database document which points to the mail file of the user who is out of office.
Make sure the Mail-in name is unique and does not resolve name lookup conflicts
Image:Out of Office - Send Full Copy to deputy

2.) Create a Group of type "Mail only",
members of this group will be Mail-in database which has been created above as well as any person who shall receive a copy of the mail(s).
You can define one or multiple recipients using internet mail addresses or Notes user names.
Image:Out of Office - Send Full Copy to deputy

3.) Edit the person document and put the Group name created above to be the forwarding address
Image:Out of Office - Send Full Copy to deputy

4.) Testing
Wait for replication to finish within your Domain and send a test mail to the user.
This mail will be delivered to the original users mail file and also to the deputy(s) defined in the group.

Remarks:
Depending on how you have configured the Recent Contacts feature your Notes client might show the name of the mail-in database in future name lookups.
If this is an issue either purge your recent contacts or disable it completely

References:

Tagged with: Administration Domino How-To Notes
Comments

1.) Untitled

Jay Marme http:// 10/08/2015 20:04:25

A variation on forwarding the emails to the deputy is for the administrator to set the mail file name in the Person Record to be the same as the deputy's. The same issue exists as with forwarding, in that no copy of the emails is captured in the mail file of the person who is out.

2.) Untitled

Jay Marme http:// 11/08/2015 17:54:55

You can also set the MailFile field of the Person Record to be the same as the deputy's while the staff member is out of the office.

3.) Some remarks

Thomas Hampel www.thomashampel.com 06/09/2015 14:12:12

Yes, thats possible...but needs to be hanled with care. The person who is out would not know what emails had arrived. Furthermore encrypted mails can not be opened by the deputy so in my opinion you should keep the original mail in the mail file of the intended recipient.

Thomas Hampel, All rights reserved.