In Microsoft Outlook, you can automatically reply to incoming e-mails with an out-of-office note that you set up in advance if you are not available for a longer period of time. We will show you two methods of setting up out-of-office notifications.
1. outlook: quick reply to out of office messages via “automatic reply “
If you want to set up an out-of-office note in Outlook without any special rules, you can do this quite quickly via “Automatic replies”. The following instructions work with all current Outlook versions, although the names may differ slightly.
- Start Outlook and click on the “File” tab at the top left.
- In the “Information” section, click on the “Automatic replies” button.
- You can select here in which period the absence message is sent. To do this, activate the option “Send automatic replies” and set the start and end date. If you do not enter anything here, the auto-reply will be sent immediately and “forever”.
- You can create a more casual absence message for your colleagues (“Inside my organisation”) and a more formal one for business contacts (“Outside my organisation”).
- In the text you should indicate the end date of your leave or absence. It is also useful for business absence notes to name a representative whom your contact can reach in case of urgent matters.
- Confirm the out-of-office note with “OK”. All mails from the start time onwards will now be answered with the text you entered.
2. define outlook absence note as rule
You can also create absence notes with a rule. This is a little more complicated, but it also allows you to create different out-of-office messages for different recipients. Depending on the Office version, the instructions may differ slightly.
- After starting Outlook, click on the “File” tab. Here the category “Information” should already be selected.
- Click on “Manage rules and notifications” further down. A new window will open.
- Under the tab “Email rules” you will find the item “New rule”. Select “Apply rule to messages received from me” here.
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In the following, you can select for which cases of senders (with certain words, for example) the out-of-office message is to be sent. If the out-of-office message is to be sent to all senders of the received e-mails, select via “Account” → “Account name” and decide on the desired e-mail account (in case you manage several accounts with Outlook).
- In the next window, select what should happen to the received e-mail. To reply to it with a template, you have to check the box “Reply to this with a specific template”. To select the template (Word file), click on the text with a blue background (“a specific template”). This activates the out-of-office note.
- You can read an English tutorial on “How to set an automatic out-of-office-reply in Outlook” at how2foru.com.
