Perhaps you’re ill or you want to enjoy your holiday without checking your phone for emails that you need to reply to, what you need is to set out of office replies!
In this post I will show you how to set out of office message or ‘Automatic reply‘ in Outlook so that when you receive an email, people will know you’re out of the office.
Set out of office message
Outlook online
We’ll cover the steps to set out of office message on Outlook online, firstly browse to your emails and click the cog in the top right.
When you’ve clicked that you want to click the search box and start searching for ‘Automatic replies‘.
Click on ‘Automatic replies‘ and you will be shown this box, I’ve separated the settings into 4 sections.
- In the first box we have your basic toggle, on and off if you will, at the minute it is on. It gives you the option to ‘Send replies only during a time period‘, you will need to click this to set your holiday period, if it is left unticked then it will just send automatic replies 24/7 which can be handy if you wanted to setup a “confirmation email” or something, but not so much for an out of office (unless you just don’t want to talk to anyone again!)
- The second box gives you a few more features if you set the ‘Send replies only during a time period‘ box, you can also block your calendar for the duration of your holiday, automatically decline new invitations for events during the period and decline and cancel any meetings during the time, all of which are pretty self explanatory.
- The third box is an out of office reply that will be sent to users within your organisation, so your colleagues.
- The fourth box includes ‘Send replies outside your organisation‘ which is asking if you want the out of office email to be sent to people who aren’t a part of your organisation, e.g. your email is user@organisation1.co.uk, if you get an email from user@organisation2.co.uk they will either get a reply if you’ve ticked the box and filled in the message body below or they won’t if you have it unticked. You can also go a step further and only allow the out of office email to be sent to contacts that you have saved.
That’s all there is to it for the outlook online, now lets look at the outlook client. First of all you’ll want to open it (obviously…).
Outlook client
Next is how to set out of office messages using the Outlook client.
With your outlook client open you’ll want to click the ‘File‘ button in the top left.
Upon doing that you will find you have the ‘Automatic Replies (Out of office)‘ button right there, click that.
You’ll be presented with a window that has two options, inside and outside of your organisation.
- On the left you have 3 boxes, similar to above you have the option to enable the automatic replies, set a time range for your holiday (this is necessary for basic “out of the office” emails, otherwise it’s just an automatic reply to all emails), and the option to choose between inside your organisation and out of your organisation. Beneath that is the email box where you type out your email.
- On the right you have the outside my organisation settings, here you can choose to set replies to people outside of your organisation and further filter it by choosing to reply to only your contacts, again followed by the email box to type out your email.
Quick steps to set out of office messages
Outlook online: settings button in the top right > search for ‘automatic replies’ > set according to your preferences
Outlook client: File > Automatic replies > set according to your preferences
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