Comments on: Microsoft boosts Office for Mac's business features

Office 2008 for Mac is starting to get business features that had been lacking, such as out-of-office e-mail capabilities.

[rcrusoe]

OOF: the spammer's friend

Out of Office replies are a great way to get more spam.

Spammers often fire randomly generated addresses at a server. When you send an OOF reply to one of these you verify to the spammer that he correctly guessed your email address.

The end result is he will be sending you more spam in the future, and he will sell your verified address to other spammers.

This is a "feature" that I always recommend my users avoid.

[ncalishome]

So what do you recommend your users do?

Leave their coworkers and business associates in the dark, or create a ton more work having to login to their email and send their own OOM messages or follow-up?

IMHO this is a great "feature" that I have used a lot when I travel. Any email program worth its weight will do a good job trapping spam so why in the world would I want to inconvenience myself?

I generally don't worry about it because Outlook 07 does a decent job with spam (and it's my work account so I don't care so much), but as the article notes you can setup rules as to who receives your OOM message if you're really worried about it, and it's really quite easy.

[axsimulate]

OOF?

OOF is such a small part of the big glaring holes Microsoft
programmed into Entourage. What I want to know is if Entourage
will be able to use resources. That way I can reserve a meeting
room from Entourage for a change, or open a shared calendar,
contacts, etc...
As for OOF, me personally I could care less about this feature
because, even though it's a hassle to set it up from OWA, I can still
set it up. But you can't reserve a resource from neither Entourage
or OWA.

[tgrenier]

resource reservations

If it is set up properly a resource is just another contact you would invite to a meeting. If you can invite a person, you can invite a projector.

[gsmiller88]

What about Access?

I never understood why a Mac version of Access wasn't included in
"OOF." Microsoft Messenger for Mac is quite crippled compared to
its Windows sibling. I mean, no video or voice conferencing?
C'mon! I must say though, I don't miss the annoying ad bar at the
bottom of the friends list found in the Windows version.