Out of Office Assistant

Connected to Exchange

If you are in an Exchange environment (ask your administrator if you do not know this) you can set the Out of the Office Assistant which is located under Tools. Since the Exchange server sends the Out of Office message you can close Outlook and shutdown your computer and it will still send the message.

Web Mailbox

If you are not in an Exchange environment your ISP might provide Out of Office functionality in the web based mailbox (ask your ISP for the web address to check your mail via a browser if you do not know this). Usually you can find an Out of Office setting in the Options section. Some have named it “Away message”, “Holiday notification”, “Automatic response” or something like that. The benefit of setting it on-line is that you can close Outlook (and even the computer) and people mailing to you will still get your away-message.

Emulate in Outlook without Exchange

If your ISP doesn’t provide Out of Office functionality either, you can create a rule that replies to all e-mails. The downside of this is that you’ll need to have your Outlook open all the time for the rule to process. Make sure you set some exceptions (for instance based on the subject field so it will not reply on subject with e.g. reply, failed, undeliverable, etc…) otherwise you could create endless mailloops between two mailservers and those can be a real threat to the mailservers!

The rule could end up looking something like this;

Apply this rule after the message arrives
(set no conditions to reply to every mail)
reply using a specific template
except if the subject contains specific words


Use an add-in

DS Development has an Auto Reply Manager which lets you easily set lots of auto reply settings.

Auto Reply Manager allows you to easily define and send auto email replies right from your desktop, notifying your contacts that you are away, confirming incoming email messages or simply sending custom email templates.