Can you auto-decline meeting invites for certain date periods?

Question

I am going away for a week and work in a business with a LOT of meetings.

Is there a feature where you can set the dates that you're away so that any meeting requests that fall within this period are automatically declined?

I don't want to come back to work with an inbox full of meeting requests to wade through that happened while I was gone.

If there is no way to do it, it would be a great function to add onto Out of Office messages.

Answer 1

Hello Bethany McL,

Thank you for posting this question in Microsoft Community!

As my further investigation, there is no direct options to auto-decline meeting invites for certain date periods in Outlook. But I did testing from my Outlook to create one appointment with select date range(Example:22th -26th May) and for Show as option select Out of Office and apply below settings:

1. Click File, go to Outlook options and access Calendar optionsto set it as below capture.

2. Check Automatic accept or decline options and confirm the request as below captures:

Finally, after this above settings, when anyone send meeting request to me within that date range (such as 24th may), that meeting auto decline, meeting moves to deleted folder and other user received decline email as well. If needed, you can check with this workaround. Note that you have to cancel the settings once you come back to work. Then any new meeting invitation will not be missed.

Hope this would be helpful. I am looking forward to receiving your reply. For my suggestion, as there is no direct option to meet your request, you may submit feedback via feedback portal https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/89a8afa3-2e1c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472 to improve this feature and enhance user experience.

Thanks.