If you receive a lot of emails either for work or from your friends and you go on a business or pleasure trip, you may need to set up automatic responses so that people who try to contact you know when you are coming back and you can respond to them. Depending on your version of Outlook you may need to set up automatic replies or activate the out of office option.
Index( )
- Set your Outlook to give automatic replies
- The Automatic Replies (Out of Office) option appears
- The Automatic Replies (Out of Office) option does not appear
- How to activate the out of office option in Outlook
- How to schedule an automatic reply in Outlook
Set your Outlook to give automatic replies
Depending on the type of email account that is registered in Outlook you will have to do two different procedures, you must enter File and follow the tutorial if the Automatic responses option (Out of office) appears or not .
The Automatic Replies (Out of Office) option appears
If when you enter the File menu, the Automatic responses option appears, you must enter and select Send automatic responses. In this menu you can set a date range for automatic replies . Putting an interval will stop sending the automatic replies at the end date and time that you have configured. If you don’t do this, you’ll have to disable automatic replies manually.
With the date configured, you must write in the Within my organization tab, the response you want to be scheduled when one of your contacts sends you an email.
The Automatic Replies (Out of Office) option does not appear
There are accounts like Yahoo! in which this option will not appear. In this case you will have to use a rule to automatically reply to any message that arrives in your email, the first thing you should do is create an Out of Office template.
To begin with, you must create an email message in Outlook , then write the subject and the body of the message that you want to be sent automatically. Then you go to the File tab and then Save As. Then in this window you are going to give the template a name and, among the Save as type options, select Outlook Template (*.oft) and click Save.
From now on you can create a new template every time you want or you can just use this every time you go on a trip, now the next step is to create an Out of Office rule .
To do this you must go to the File tab and then to the Manage rules and alerts option . A window will open where you are going to choose the Email Rules tab and there you must click New rule, then Start blank rule, then Apply rule to messages you receive and Next.
If you want the rule to respond to all email messages you receive, you should not change anything and click Next until Outlook asks if you want to apply this rule to all messages, you should answer yes.
Already done this in What do you want to do with the message? You must select one or several actions, according to what you need and select Forward using a certain template . You can then edit the rule description and when you’re done, click on the underlined text for a given template.
Once this is done, at the top of the box in Search you must click on Select a response template , then on User templates in the file system. Then click Select the template you created earlier, then Open and Next.
In this step you can add all the exceptions that you think are necessary and click Next. You must assign a name to the rule, you can put the one you want and that’s it. At the end of the rule it will be activated by default, if you do not want to activate it at once, uncheck the box and click finish.
You can activate it whenever you want in the Manage rules and alerts menu, there you must look for the rule that you created to activate it and click OK.
How to activate the out of office option in Outlook
If you have Microsoft Outlook 2007 you must activate the Out of Office option , for that you must go to the Tools option and then in Out of Office Assistant, then activate the I am out of office option.
Once there , write the message you want to be sent when you receive an email in the box that says Automatically reply only once to each sender with the following text. When you’re done, click OK.
How to schedule an automatic reply in Outlook
To schedule automatic responses in Outlook you must follow the steps given above to configure automatic responses and there you can program the time interval in which you want this option to work.
If you access from Outlook Web you can also program your automatic replies , for that you must access your mail on the official Outlook page and log in, once in your mail select the option See all Outlook settings, there you will select the Mail option and then Automatic Replies.
In this menu you are going to activate the Automatic responses and you are going to program the time interval that you want them to be active and if you want them to answer all the messages or only those from your contacts. Once you’re in your Outlook account, you can also add folders to your email to better organize it or add a signature to all your emails to give it a professional look.
