Exchange provides the ability to configure Out of Office messages. The owner of a mailbox can configure different messages to be sent to users inside the organization and outside. The user is free to enter any text he wants, in any language, but the subject of the Out of Office message i handled by the server. Typically the Out of Office message you receive when sending mail to a mailbox that has Out of Office messages enabled is Out of Office: <subject of message sent to the mailbox>.
The Out of Office phrase is used by the server because the languages attribute of the mailbox that has Out of Office messages enabled is English (en-US). But you may also see something like this, if the language of the mailbox has been changed:
I this case the phrase is Fraværende, which is the Norwegian translation for Out of Office (or close). The mailbox using Out of Office in this case has its language set to Norwegian (nb-NO). I you want to change the language settings for a mailbox, there are two ways (that I know of):
- The user can change the language from within Outlook Web Access:
- The administrator can change the language from the Exchange Management Shell (EMS):
Command for a single mailbox:
Set-Mailbox morgan –Languages nb-NO
Command for several mailboxes:
Get-Mailbox | Set-Mailbox –Languages en-US
A full list of all language codes is available here, but I do not know if Exchange 2007 support them all.
A little note about the Languages attribute. It is an array that can actually hold several values. I have seen mailboxes with two languages set here, but I am unsure of how this has come about. I am guessing that something has been set in OWA, but that some setting(s) still remain in a different language. I am not sure how this affects Out of Office messages.
Also to note is that in my lab I had to restart both the Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Topology Service and the Microsoft Exchange Information Store services to make the change take affect. This is probably caused by the Exchange Directory cache.
On a related note, look here for ways to change the language of DSN messages. There are two settings, one for internal DSNs and one for external.
For another post about the workings of Out of Office look here.