Detecting Outlook autoreply/out-of-office emails

Question

Been googling for this and haven't found anything ...

Does anybody know if there is a way, given an Outlook email item, to detect whether it was sent by the "Out Of Office Assistant"? Is there any property that Outlook sets on the object, or any header information, that identifies an email as such? I was hoping not to have to parse the subject line for "Out Of Office", etc.

It would be great if there were some standard, so autoreplies from other email services (like Gmail) could also be detected, but for me Outlook is the highest priority.

Answer 1

Look for these headers:

• x-autorespond
• precedence or x-precedence with value "auto_reply", "bulk" or "junk"
• auto-submitted with value "auto-replied"
• x-auto-response-suppress (not always, see answer below)

And subjects starting with:

• Auto:
• Automatic reply
• Autosvar
• Automatisk svar
• Automatisch antwoord
• Abwesenheitsnotiz
• Risposta Non al computer
• Automatisch antwoord
• Auto Response
• Respuesta automática
• Fuori sede
• Out of Office
• Frånvaro
• Réponse automatique

Answer 2

This question often comes up in Google, so I decided to add an important note.

Don't ever use X-Auto-Response-Suppress in your filters as suggested in the other answer.

X-Auto-Response-Suppress is used by Exchange to tell other servers to not send auto-replies in response to an email. It doesn't mean that this email is an auto-response.

We had to learn it the hard way, hope you won't have to. I've also wrote a blog post with more details: http://www.jitbit.com/maxblog/18-detecting-outlook-autoreplyout-of-office-emails-and-x-auto-response-suppress-header/