Zimbra Autoresponder

Out-of-office notices, acknowledgement emails, and automatic replies are everyday needs. Zimbra covers the simplest case - a personal vacation reply each user turns on in their own preferences - but there is no central autoresponder management in Zimbra. Anything beyond one user's out-of-office means configuring accounts one by one with zmprov, or bolting on scripts.

This page walks through the per-account zmprov approach and where it gets tedious, then shows how MSH Zimbra Rules provides scheduled, loop-safe autoresponder rules from a central web panel.

The manual way: per-account zmprov settings

Zimbra stores the out-of-office reply as account preferences. An administrator can switch it on for one mailbox from the command line (as the zimbra user):

zmprov ma alice@example.com \
  zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeReplyEnabled TRUE \
  zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeReply "I am out of the office until August 15." \
  zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeFromDate 20260801000000Z \
  zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeUntilDate 20260815000000Z

For anything organisation-wide - a support acknowledgement, a reply for a shared address, a notice for a whole team - you end up looping over accounts:

for account in $(zmprov gdlm support-team@example.com); do
  zmprov ma "$account" \
    zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeReplyEnabled TRUE \
    zimbraPrefOutOfOfficeReply "Thank you - we received your message."
done

It works for a single user, but it does not scale or stay flexible:

• Per-account settings. Every mailbox is configured separately; a team-wide reply means scripting and remembering to undo it later.
• One reply per account. Different responses for external senders, specific domains, or certain subjects are not possible.
• Plain text workflow. Composing a formatted HTML acknowledgement through zmprov arguments is unpleasant and error-prone.
• Hard to audit. There is no central overview of who has an autoresponder active and until when.
• Conditions take scripting. Rules like "only reply to external senders" or "skip mailing lists" require extra logic outside the built-in mechanism.

Autoresponder rules with MSH Zimbra Rules

MSH Zimbra Rules adds autoresponders as rules in the web administrator panel. You set the reply subject and body, add conditions, and optionally schedule a date range - with loop protection handled for you.

Set it up in four steps

1. Install MSH Zimbra Rules on the Zimbra server and connect the milter engine to Zimbra's Postfix with a few zmlocalconfig settings.
2. Create an autoresponder rule with the reply subject and message body.
3. Add conditions and a schedule - target the right senders or recipients and set optional start and end dates.
4. Test and enable with the built-in rules tester.

Because rules are centralised, setting an out-of-office for one person or a whole team is a few clicks, and built-in loop protection keeps replies from bouncing back and forth or hitting mailing lists.