Whether you’re on vacation, on a business trip, sick, or not contactable for other reasons: an automatic out-of-office reply informs your e-mail contacts about your absence. Depending on your needs, you can also use Outlook auto reply to refer the query to a colleague who is covering for you during your absence. The wording of the ideal out-of-office e-mail depends on the context.
If you’ve already created the text for your out-of-office message, you usually want to generate it as an automatic reply in your e-mail program. In Outlook, you can specify who gets your out-of-office reply and set up rules ahead of time so that e-mails from designated people are answered differently than other contacts. We’ll show you how to set out-of-office in Outlook according to your needs.
Following these easy steps, you’ll learn both the basic and advanced options for how to create an out-of-office message. In Outlook, begin by clicking “File” in the top left corner. This will bring up a menu window with your account information and some options.
Click on the “Automatic Replies (Out of Office)” button. This opens a new window.
You can enable the automatic reply function in this window and set a time for Outlook to send your out-of-office message. If your absence is effective immediately, simply leave the “Only send during this time range:” box unchecked.
There are two tabs above the message box which allow you to set up different Outlook away messages for internal and external contacts. Any e-mail contacts who share the same domain (after the @) with you will receive the automatic reply for “Inside My Organization.”
All other contacts will receive the out-of-office reply you designated on the right tab. If you prefer the replies to be identical, simply copy (Ctrl C) and paste (Ctrl V) the message from the first tab into the second tab (note that right-click copy and paste is disabled in the out-of-office assistant). You might prefer using different replies, a more casual or light-hearted one for colleagues, and a strictly professional tone for clients, for example. You can also specify that only people in your address book receive an automatic response.
When your out-of-office reply messages are ready to go, click “OK.” Your automatic reply, including the out-of-office message, is now scheduled in Outlook.
On vacation and don’t want to see e-mails from colleagues or customers, but want to be available for your boss in case something urgent arises? Waiting impatiently for an answer from a sales partner and want to see it right away? Want to at least be available to your department? Outlook can accommodate such instances in “Automatic Reply Rules.” Just click the “Rules” button in the bottom left corner of the automatic replies dialogue box.
With “Add Rule,” you can now follow the easy steps to define rules for specific e-mail contacts.
From top to bottom, you can specify the following criteria to set up your reply rules:
The following actions are available:
Once you’ve mastered the basics, you might want to learn how to set out of office in Outlook using the “Advanced” button at the top right. This allows you to set more specific rules.
These special functions allow you to specify the following:
Once your rules have been defined, they appear in the overview.
Use this list to easily turn rules on or off and to edit them. The example above shows a special rule for your boss, whose e-mails will then be forwarded to your private e-mail so that you can be reached in urgent cases. All other contacts will receive one of two out-of-office replies – which depends on whether they are internal colleagues or external contacts. When you have designated all the rules that should apply, save them by clicking “OK.”
If you haven’t specified a timeframe for your absence, remember to turn off the auto reply when you are back in the office.
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