webmail.telkomsa.net - Autoforward and Auto-responder not working. Help!

[InTheCube]

So I am trying to move a client away from using their *@telkomsa.net email address, and have helped them to register their own domain and created a new email address on this domain. Their email is hosted on an Office 365 Business Premium subscription.

The next step is to auto-forward emails sent to their old email address to the new one, and then set up an auto-responder informing senders of the new email address to be used in future. I have set both of these up from the TelkomSA webmail interface at https://webmail.telkomsa.net.

However, for some reason, it just isn't working. I've sent test emails to the TelkomSA email address from several different domains hosted with different ISPs, but both the auto-forward and the auto-responder are not working at all. I've done this a 100 times before with different ISPs, with no issues at all. But this is the first time I am doing this with a TelkomSA email address.

Does anyone have any idea what the issue might be? I did try dialling 10210 and getting help, but as usual they are clueless.

Is there a rep on these forums who can assist, and get more competent people to look at the issue?

 

[InTheCube]

Bump!

 

[InTheCube]

No response from TelkomZA, supposedly Telkom's rep on these forums, and no response on their Facebook page either. Dismal.

I ended up creating a Gmail account, and then adding the [email protected] email account to Gmail which then downloaded all the emails. I then set up a rule to auto-forward the emails to the new Office 365 email address. Unfortunately, the auto-responder on Gmail does not work for mails received through 3rd party POP accounts. So I had to set up the auto-responder in Outlook 2016, using the "Rules and Alerts" window. I basically created a rule that said that any email received and "sent to" "[email protected]" must receive an an automatic reply based on a message template. You have to create the message template first though, by creating a new blank email, formatting your message the way you want it, and then clicking "Save as..." and choosing to save it as a template.

Not an ideal solution. The client will need to ensure that he leaves his PC on permanently with MS Outlook open all the time (or at least during office hours), in order for the auto-responder to work. Even then, the auto-response will be highly delayed, as Gmail has its own algorithm to determine how often it will download email from 3rd party POP accounts. Apparently, the algorithm is of the exponential back-off type, which means the less email you get, the less often it will check, exponentially. You can't set it to check every X minutes. You can however manually force it to check.

At least the client will only need to deal with this for a month. This is the problem with using the email services of your ISP. They suck, get broken, and never get fixed.

Edit: In hindsight, I now realise that I can do away with the Gmail 3rd party mailbox step, and just use Outlook alone. I will need to set up both the Exchange/Office 365 email account, as well as the TelkomSA POP mail box, and then create the auto-responder and auto-forward rules in Outlook itself. The auto-responder depends on Outlook being open all the time anyway, and they are only going to read the auto-forwarded email when they are at the PC in any case. If I set up the Ofice 365 email account on a mobile device as well, then the Gmail auto-forward rule might be quicker, depending on if the computer is switched off or loses power or connectivity at any point.