Making yourself available to the professional world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is an impossibility and this is where the impact of vacations and breaks kick in. As communications with internal and external parties become more and more dependent on email and email clients, the importance of automatic email replies (or simply auto-reply) is quite evident.
It is common to see professionals compose an auto-reply message and configure it with their email accounts with respect to their vacation time period. The well-known ‘Out of Office’ message is then sent out to all senders from the recipient, thus, ensuring a stress-free break for the unavailable receiving party. When we refer to the professional world and email communication, Microsoft Outlook 2013 comes to mind, and even though it is widely recognized, some configurations prove challenging. In this post, we explore how Microsoft Outlook 2013 can be used to set automatic email replies without Microsoft Exchange Server for email accounts like Gmail, Hotmail and the like.
The first step in setting auto-replies in Microsoft Outlook 2013 or any other email client, for that matter is to compose a message under a specific subject. It is a common scenario to mention ‘Out of Office’ as the subject and write out a message body such that the duration of your unavailability along with the alternative POC (Point of Contact) is fairly evident. After this, you are now ready to set up Office 2013 to send auto-replies to some or all of the colleagues who send an email message to you during the relevant time period.
Microsoft Outlook 2013 allows you to use the auto-reply feature without the need for Microsoft Exchange Server and encouraging you to set the desired Outlook Template and Rules to achieve the full functionality.
To create a new Outlook Template (for the auto-reply message configuration), select the Home tab from the ribbon interface and click the New Email button at the top left corner. A new Compose Email window will instantly open up, where you can type the subject and message body as per your requirement. Once this is done, click File followed by Save As in order to save the email template.
You will now have the option to save the email template in the relevant format from the Save As dialog box. Select the Save As Type for the drop down menu such that Outlook Template (.oft file format) is selected.
You have now successfully completed the first aspect of the tutorial: how to set up an Outlook Template. The next and final aspect is to set the relevant rules such that the template is then used as an auto-reply message. To achieve this click the Manage Rules & Alerts option from the Rules drop down menu under the Home tab.
Once the Rules & Alerts dialog box opens up, click New Rule to initiate the process using the Rules Wizard. In Step 1 in the Rules Wizard, remember to check (enable) the reply using a specific template option in response to What do you want to do with the message question. In Step 2, under the Edit the rule description, click a specific template.
The final step is to select the User Templates in File system in the Look In box within the Select A Reply Template dialog box. All that is left is to name the rule and click Next repetitively till Finish. This rules activates the automatic email replies feature such that the Out Of Office message is sent only once to a sender. This is a distinguishing aspect of the auto-reply feature in Microsoft Outlook 2013 as it prevents the sender from being bombarded with auto-replies every time he or she CCs you in an email.
To turn off automatic replies, click Home followed by Manage Rules & Alerts from the Rules menu so that the relevant rule is unchecked in the Email Rules tab in the active dialog box. It is important to note that the method highlighted for setting up automatic email replies in Outlook 2013 is without using the Microsoft Exchange Server (or Out Of Office Assistant as known formally).
If you want to check whether you have an Exchange account, confirm the type from the list in the Account Settings window. If you have any queries regarding the Auto Reply configuration in other versions of Microsoft Outlook, feel free to comment in the section, below.