If you need to automatically respond to emails then please do not use the OOOA (Out Of Office Assistant) that will tell people are out of the office which is not factually correct and lets not forget that out of office messages are sent once every 24 hours, so that is not an option.
Neither is sending email from a template as a Outlook mail rule, this is also very inefficient as it requires Outlook to be running as this is not a "server side" rule.
Exchange Online cannot help you out with a transport rule as this cannot be done server side with the old option of "reply with a message" as you can see this no longer exists as a valid option:
If you are running a current version of Exchange on-premises then this has also been removed as its not a good idea:
So, how do we complete this action in the current century, well that is simple with Power Automate and a flow so first you need to navigate to the power automate website which is shown below:
https://make.powerautomate.com/
So, how do we complete this action in the current century, well that is simple with Power Automate and a flow so first you need to navigate to the power automate website which is shown below:
https://make.powerautomate.com/
When you get asked to sign in this needs to be the account of the user you wish to the responses from, so if this is your account all good, but if this shared mailbox you will need to have delegated permissions to that mailbox and have the ability to login as that user.
When you finally login this will get you to this screen, ignore the copilot rubbish on the main screen, you do not need it, you need to click Create as below:
You will then want a "Automated cloud flow" as below:
You then need to give the Flow a name and then search for "email" and choose the "when a new email arrives v3" and then click Create:
You will then get a "designer" appear click on the option you see here:
That will popup a side menu like this from the drop box select "Subject Filter" from the dropdown as below:
You will then see that the "Subject filter" has been added and in this you need to enter your desired subject as below, once entered click on the main workspace and the pop-box will disappear:
Then you need to click on the + then the "Add an action" as below:
You will then want a "Automated cloud flow" as below:
You then need to give the Flow a name and then search for "email" and choose the "when a new email arrives v3" and then click Create:
You will then see that the "Subject filter" has been added and in this you need to enter your desired subject as below, once entered click on the main workspace and the pop-box will disappear:
Then you need to click on the + then the "Add an action" as below:
Then we need to enter "email" in the search box and choose the "Sent an email (v2) which needs to come from Office 365 Outlook as below:
This will pop-up another window, lets start with the Subject - for this we needs to the word "Re:" then we need to click on the query button (the lightening symbol) at the end of the subject field:
That will then popup a list of options from which we need to select "Subject" as below:
We now need to fix the "To" field this is slightly different, we first need to the click "Advanced Mode" for more options:
When you click this option this will give us the option for the blue query options as you can see below, click the same query button:
You then need the "From" option which should then populate the "To" field as below:
Then you need to give the message a body with some text
When you click on the main designer you should see your two actions as below, click the Save button as below:
When you click save you should get the option to say all is ready to test as below:
We now need need to test the flow so on the top menu bar choose the option called "Test"
We need the option for Manual as then you can test it right now:
It will now wait for you to send a message that matches the criteria:
Once the email has been sent this should confirm that the flow fired:
This confirms the flow works when you click the back button you will end on the main flow status page as below, notice at the bottom the flow has fired and succeeded.
The flow fired but did I get the email, well people, yes I did here it is below, on detecting the subject it was send back to the sender with the same subject and the body text (I changed from the one in the screenshot earlier)
This will pop-up another window, lets start with the Subject - for this we needs to the word "Re:" then we need to click on the query button (the lightening symbol) at the end of the subject field:
That will then popup a list of options from which we need to select "Subject" as below:
We now need to fix the "To" field this is slightly different, we first need to the click "Advanced Mode" for more options:
When you click this option this will give us the option for the blue query options as you can see below, click the same query button:
You then need the "From" option which should then populate the "To" field as below:
Then you need to give the message a body with some text
When you click on the main designer you should see your two actions as below, click the Save button as below:
When you click save you should get the option to say all is ready to test as below:
We now need need to test the flow so on the top menu bar choose the option called "Test"
We need the option for Manual as then you can test it right now:
It will now wait for you to send a message that matches the criteria:
This confirms the flow works when you click the back button you will end on the main flow status page as below, notice at the bottom the flow has fired and succeeded.
The flow fired but did I get the email, well people, yes I did here it is below, on detecting the subject it was send back to the sender with the same subject and the body text (I changed from the one in the screenshot earlier)