I don't post to this list all that often anymore, but it seems that
whenever I do I then get someone's "Out of Office AutoReply" message
in return.  It's happened with more than half the messages I've sent
in the last three months, and I find it quite annoying.

All the offenders in my case are using MS Exchange.  While this
account is a UNIX account, my other E-mail account at the university
is an Exchange account.  I've taken a look at the "out of office"
feature of Outlook.  While the easy way of doing it is to autoreply to
each sender with specific message text, with somewhat more work, by
using the rules facility in conjunction with the Out of Office
Assistant, you can get Exchange to be more selective about it.  For
instance, you can autoreply to messages "sent directly to me", or
"copied (cc) to me".  While it's more work to do it this way, that
work only has to be done once, the first time you do it.  And it
certainly is more considerate of your fellow list members, if you
don't want to set yourself to NOMAIL instead (the other way of
handling this).

BTW, I have Outlook 2000 as my E-mail client for that account; I don't
know whether all of this is supported in Outlook 97.

Dennis