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Automated meeting responses not processing for external users

This one is to address an issue where automated meeting responses are not processed from Room mailboxes to external email addresses

Let’s say, I tried to book a Conference room in my company MSExchangeGuru from my personal email live.com email address.

Well, it is accepting the meeting request and the room is booked too, but not sending an automated response from the room mailbox stating that it is accepted.

Something like this:

***********************************************************************

—–Original Appointment—–
From: MSExchangeGuru_TelePresenceRoom
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 10:32 AM
To: ratish@msexchangeguru.com
Subject: Accepted: Meet Now
When: Thursday, June 09, 2011 10:00 PM-10:30 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada).
Where: MSExchangeGuru_TelePresenceRoom

Your request was accepted.

Sent by Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

***********************************************************************

Now, the above response message will be processed if I sent from my MSExchangeGuru email address and not from my live.com email address.

Any meeting invite sent from my Live.com email address will be accepted by the room and moved to the deleted items folder and “This behavior is by design”.

To resolve this:

  1. Run: Get-MailboxCalendarSettings MSExchangeGuru_TelePresenceRoom |fl
  2. Ensure that you have “ProcessExternalMeetingMessages” set to “True” on the Room mailbox
  3. If it is set to False, run:

    Set-MailboxCalendarSettings MSExchangeGuru_TelePresenceRoom –ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $True

  4. You need to have this setting enabled for all Conf rooms which should process external meetings
  5. Now comes the “Pain” part. If the sender is an external party, in my case ratishsekhar@live.com, then you need to create a contact in your AD with an alias since Exchange need to lookup the GAL and need to see the email address present in AD and send the response message

To get a list of all Room mailboxes, run this:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited | where {$_.ResourceType -eq “Room”} |Export-CSV C:\Roommailboxes.csv

Now copy the alias to a txt file and use the Get-Content cmdlet to see who all has False set for ProcessExternalMeetingMessages

Get-Content .\List.txt |Get-MailboxCalendarSettings |Ft Identity, ProcessExternalMeetingMessages

Finally, to set it to true for all Room mailboxes,

Get-Content .\List.txt |Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $True

Ratish Nair
MVP Exchange
Team @MSExchangeGuru

Keywords: Auto accept meeting requests from external users for Room mailbox, automated meeting responses not working for external users exchange 2007

10 Responses to “Automated meeting responses not processing for external users”

  1. JoJack82 Says:

    Will this work with exchange 2010? If not, do you know of any way to get this working between two exchange 2010 forests that have a federated trust?

  2. JoJack82 Says:

    ignore my last comment, this did work for 2010. The user I was testing with didn’t have the contact on the other side. This post was extremely helpful, we were looking everywhere to get this working.

  3. Ratish Sekhar Says:

    Glad it worked out… !!!

  4. STEVE Says:

    So I’ve tried this, I have a contact in the organization with the meeting room and it is not working. Exchange 2010 SP2 Ru4. My question is do I need a contact with in my Org of the meeting room as well? or am i missing something
    ProcessExternalMeetingMessages : True

  5. Cameron Says:

    Have checked settings for our meeting room and settings are as per above and I can send a request from an external user, I have logged in via OWA and confirmed resource receives meeting request. But there is no auto response received to the external email address. Any ideas/help on this issue would be appreciated

  6. Ratish Sekhar Says:

    Please confirm if you have completed Step 5:

    5. Now comes the “Pain” part. If the sender is an external party, in my case ratishsekhar@live.com, then you need to create a contact in your AD with an alias since Exchange need to lookup the GAL and need to see the email address present in AD and send the response message

  7. Adam Says:

    For exchange 2010 use this:
    With Powershell use the Set-CalendarProcessing command to set those when creating the new mailbox. You could script something or just pipe it in:

    Get-mailbox | Set-CalendarProcessing -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages: $true

  8. Paul Says:

    Will this work with Mail Users as well? We have some external members who have an AD account in our domain, but their email is hosted elsewhere.

    I created a Mail User, but meeting requests are only Tentative and no response is sent. Any idea what I’m doing wrong?

  9. Paul Says:

    Nevermind, it seems this does not work with Exchange 2010 anymore

    http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/df4a1f61-a94a-4a39-aa3d-0ca171cba980/exchange-2010-calendar-auto-accept-receipts-for-external-users-unresolved?forum=exchange2010

  10. JD Says:

    Hi Ratish!

    This seems so easy but it is not working for us or our use-case is slightly different. 🙁

    My scenario is: external user creates meeting, I accept, I fwd it to a meeting room to book the room — the meeting room takes the fwd and leaves it in “tentative” status forever. Also, even with the contact created I get no accept/reject message, most likely because it is in tentative…

    Exch 2010
    AutomateProcessing : AutoAccept
    ProcessExternalMeetingMessages : True

    Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂

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