[Article] Using an Out of Office automatic reply on certain days of the week

Question

I’m frequently asked how to set up an automatic reply (aka Out of Office or OOF) for specific recurring dates, such as every Thursday.  While the perfect solution would be for the calendar to set the automatic reply if you have an appointment whose Show time as is marked as Out of Office, it’s not currently possible. This means most users are limited to manually configuring automatic replies.

In a corporate Exchange environment (including Office 365 business accounts), there are third party utilities that can be used to configure Out of Office in advance for multiple dates and in bulk (for multiple users at once).  Unfortunately, this capability is generally limited to administrators, as end-users don’t have the permissions necessary to do this.

This leaves a lot of users looking for a way to easily configure automatic replies.

The recommended method is to use set the Out of Office autoreply up in advance to start at a specific time and end a couple of hours after you return. When you return to the office, turn off the automatic reply and immediately setup the automatic reply for the next date.

Although far from automated, it’s the safest method since you won’t have to worry about “mail storms” if the recipient also uses an automated reply as each sender will receive just one Out of Office message.  You can set up the automatic reply from Outlook desktop software or Outlook on the web.

These articles have instructions to configure automatic replies:

• Send automatic out of office replies from Outlook
• Send automatic (out of office) replies in Outlook on the web
• Send automatic replies in Outlook.com
• Send automatic Out of Office replies from Outlook for Mac

Rule to Reply from Server

A more automated method uses rules to send a reply from the server.  There is one problem using rules to reply to the sender:  The rule will reply to every message, which can be a problem if the sender is also using an automatic reply.

See Use rules to create an out of office message for instructions. 

You can limit when the rule runs using one of these methods:

1. Create a rule to look for specific words in the message header, where the words are the days of the week you want the rule to run. Set exceptions for words that may indicate the message is an automatic reply. 
2. Create multiple rules using the condition “Received after [date]” and “Received before [date]”. To reduce the number of rules you need, create a rule for each date this month and at the end of each month, update the rules for the next month.

Note that when you use either method, the rule runs on the calendar day, midnight to midnight, not from the end of a workday until the start of the next workday.

To run the rule after you leave the office until you return, you need to enable the rule when you leave the office and turn it off when you return. If you use Outlook desktop software and can use a macro, you can automate this step using task reminders. See Enable or Disable an Outlook Rule using Reminders for instructions.

Answer 1

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