How to auto respond/ auto decline meetings outside work hours

Question

Hello,

While we work globally and across timezones, is there a way to set up a rule to politely auto-decline meeting invites (especially with DST) ? I looked up various rules but just could not find a "time-based" rule in the ruleset. Hence thought I'd ask here. Thanks

Joe

Answer 1

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your newly updating clarification. Regarding to your concerns of time zone auto respond/decline, currently it is not feasible to achieve that, but you can create a rule which enables auto reply to meeting invitation based on a template you set up. In the template, you can demonstrate that you won’t accept meeting from 6 pm to 8 am UTC+08:00. The way to create such rule is:

Open the Outlook client > Home > Rules > Manage Rules & Alerts > New Rule > Apply rule on messages I receive > Next > which is a meeting invitation or update > Next > reply using a specific template > click a specific template and choose the template that demonstrate you cannot accept meeting from 6 pm to 8 am UTC+08:00 > Next > Finish.

Then, if the meeting organizer receive the auto reply, he/she will know whether you can participate the meeting at that time.

The way to create an email template can be viewed in Create an email message template.

Sorry that it can only be a workaround for you. But you can share your idea about time zone auto respond/decline in Microsoft official website Outlook UserVoice to vote and share. Our related teams’ engineers will view customers’ feedbacks in that platform regularly and may update products based on them.

If you still have any related questions, please feel free to contact us here. Thank you so much for your kind understanding.

Have a good day : )

Best Regards,

Ariel

Answer 2

Thaks Ariel. I tried this earlier and it didnt work. :(. The rule doesn't kick in because this still only looks at it as if it was a generic out of office reply. It is not time zone sensitive.

If we can find a way to do it time zone sensitive that would solve the problem.

Let me explain the scenario:

Let's say I work in Hong Kong and I have colleagues in Dubai, London and New York. All of them are on different time zones obviously; 4 hrs, 7 hrs and 12 hrs behind me (without factoring in Daylight savings), 

I work 8am to 6pm local time in HK.

If someone from say London wants to setup a meeting during their late afternoon at say 2pm London time with me as a participant, that would fall outside my core work hours (9pm in HK). If this rule is hit, I want Outlook to to kick-in an "Auto-reply" rule stating that I have "declined the invite" to meeting (the text itself is unimportant) to the Calendar invite (when it falls outside my designated working hours of 8am-6pm HK time). 

This is what I'm trying to accomplish. Thanks in advance :)

Joe

Answer 3

Hi Joe,

Welcome to our Community.

After our tests and research, we have not found any rules that can auto-decline meeting invites based on working time. However, since your post is under Outlook category, may I assume that you are using Outlook client? If yes, you can try a workaround by creating unreal events during your off-duty time so auto-decline can come into play within this period:

1. Creating a nonexistent event during your off-duty time in your Outlook calendar, and set it recurring:

Open the Outlook client > switch to calendar page by clicking the Calendar icon at the left bottom corner > Home > New Meeting > click Make Recurring and set the recurrence pattern, OK > complete creating meeting, click Send.

2. Open the Automatic decline option in Outlook.

File > Options > Calendar > Automatic accept or decline > select Automatically decline meeting requests that conflict with an existing appointment or meeting (NOTE: you need to select Automatically accept meeting requests and remove canceled meetings at the same time) > OK.

Hope the above information is useful to you. If you still have some related questions, please feel free to let us know here, and we will be glad to help you.

Best Regards,

Ariel

Answer 4

Hi Joe,

Do you have any questions to the workaround given above? If you need more helps, please feel free to let us know.

Best Regards,

Ariel