Out of Office Settings in Outlook

A. Summary:

When you are out of the office, you can notify your email senders of this automatically. Advanced users can also set rules to organize emails received when they are out of the office.

B. Key Points:

· Use Tools—Out of Office Assistant to set up an email reply to messages sent to you when you are out of the office

· Once you turn it on, you will be asked if you want to turn off your Out of Office message each time you open Outlook

· Your Out of Office message will go to all your email senders, including those outside of AFSC

· The Out of Office message will only go out once to each email sender

· For corrections, updates, or clarifications on this Star Point, please email Elizabeth Wallace

C. Details:

Setting up an Out of Office message in your Outlook email will let your senders know why they are not getting a reply from you. These Out of Office email messages will go out to all your senders, both inside AFSC and to outside senders. This auto-reply will go to each sender’s email only one time each time Out of Office is turned on.

To set up the Out of Office message, open Outlook, and go to the Tools menu. Click on the Out of Office Assistant. You will see the following:

You may want to include in your message the dates you will be out of the office, any emergency contact information your senders might need, or whether you will be checking your email or not while you are out of the office.

Adding a Rule to your Out of Office Message

If you are relatively new to Outlook, you may not want to set any rules for your messages here, because if you set the rule incorrectly you may misplace your emails. So this step is for advanced users only.

If you are not going to check e-mail messages while you are out of the office, use the Out of Office Assistant with rules to automatically manage incoming messages. Click on Add Rule. You will see the following screen:

Be careful about filling in both the “From” and the “Sent To” boxes, or the “From” and the “Subject” boxes. If you select more than one condition in this “Edit Rule” box, the rule will be applied only to messages that meet all of the selected conditions. However, if you set multiple criteria for a single condition, the rule will be applied to any message that meets at least one criterion for that condition. Thus, it is OK to select multiple names in the “From” or in the “Sent To” box.

It’s always good to click on Check Names after you have filled out the “From” or “Sent To” box to be sure that you have correctly typed the email account name.

If the message is coming from your boss, you might want to have the message forwarded to another email account or moved to a folder labeled “Important”.

Rules are applied in the order in which they appear from top to bottom in the list of rules. So check “Do not process subsequent rules” to make your “Advanced” rules, if any, the last ones processed.

Clicking on “Reply with Template” will allow you to set up a specific email format for your Out of Office Replies.

If you want to filter your emails further, say by date or by size, click on Advanced: