Outlook 2007: Out of Office assistant

      

                    When you know you are going to be out of the office for a few days, you can set up the Out of Office Assistant to reply automatically, letting people know that you are enjoying your vacation while they are sending you emails. You can also add rules to forward messages based on different criteria.

Open Outlook and Click on Tools \ Out of Office Assistant.

 

Next check I am currently Out of the Office and compose a message for the sender. You can include as little or as much information in this box. In this example I wrote a fairly generic reply message.

 

After filling this out you can just click OK or you can continue to add specific rules to the message. To do this click on the Add Rule button.

 

If you want the rule to only apply to a small set of contacts, you can add contacts or a contact list by clicking on the From button and selecting them there. If you want the rule to apply to any incoming email, then select a combination of both “Sent directly to me” and “Copied (Cc) to me”.

You can choose different actions to take for this rule. For instance if the message is coming from your boss you might want to have the message forwarded to another account, such as your mobile. Or you might want to have it reply with a different template. In this example I just chose to have them sent to my Inbox folder.

When you are done click on OK. You can then add another rule if you want to, just remember that the first matching rule in the list will be executed, but the rest of the matching rules will be executed if you don’t check the “Do not process subsequent rules” option. (Notice the options to move the rules up and down in the last screen)

When you’ve completed everything you will be back to the Out of Office Assistant window in Outlook. Once you have verified everything click OK.

 

Now every time you get an email from a specified address the user will automatically get your Auto Reply. This is very useful in the office and in business environments. It allows your customers and co-workers know you are not available and who to contact if they need further assistance.

These steps will work for Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.