Out of Office Assistant in Outlook
Outlook Exchange has an Out of Office Assistant tool that will deliver a reply to any email messages received while the Out of Office is "On". This tool can be customized to meet different users needs while they are away from the office for various lengths of time and for various reasons. This tip will show users how to set up the Out of Office Assistant, and do some customization.
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Accessing the Out of Office Assistant
While in the Inbox, click on Tools>Out of Office Assistant. This will open the Out of Office Assistant dialog box.
Setting up the Out of Office Assistant
To turn on the Out of Office Assistant, click on the "I am Currently Out of the Office" radio button, outlined in Red. One of the nice things about the way this tool works is that the AutoReply sent will only be sent once to each person the user receives email from while out of the office.
The next step is to either create a new message or modify the existing message that is in the text box. Messages are stored from the previous time the user used the Out of Office Assistant. Once the message is ready, the user can click on OK and save the message.
When returning to Outlook users will receive a message that looks like the image below. It gives the user the option to turn off the Out of Office Assistant.
This is the quick and easy method for using the Out of Office Assistant.
If users forget to turn on the Out of Office Assistant and leave the office, they can go to Outlook Web Access, click on Options, and turn on the Out of Office Assistant and create a message.
Some Advanced Options
In the lower half of the Out of Office Assistant dialog box are the tools that allow users to create rules for how certain incoming messages are handled while the user is Out of the Office.
One example is a rule to delete messages that are going to be untimely when the user returns. For example, I get emails from NOAA re. current weather conditions. The worse the weather, the more emails I receive. When I return, I don't like having to go through and delete those messages, so I am going to go through the steps involved in creating a rule to delete these messages when they arrive.
Begin by clicking on the Add Rule... button. The Edit Rule dialog box will open.
In this case I added the email address of the sender to the From: text box. Then under "Perform these actions:" I selected Delete. This will take all messages received from this address while I have the Out of Office Assistant turned on, and delete them.
Notice that there are several other options. Messages can be moved, copied, marked as important, forwarded, and users can even send a reply that is created as a template.
While creating these rules is a more advanced feature, it can come in handy for some users.