Automatic Reply – Vacation Messages, Etc.

Using Outlook 2002 (XP)

There are two specific ways to send automatic replies to your emails. You can use the “Out of Office Assistant” tool, or you can set up a “rule” using the “Rules Wizard”.

If you use the “Out of Office Assistant”, it will only reply one time to each sender. This means that if John Smith sends several emails to you, he will only receive the automatic reply the first time he sends an email to you.

If you use the “Rules Wizard” to set up a rule, the server will reply to every message, even if the sender is the same on more than one of the incoming messages.

How to set up the “Out of Office Assistant”

With your Outlook Inbox messages displayed, click the “Tools” menu, and select “Out of Office Assistant”.

The Out of Office window (as seen below) will open. By default, “I am currently In the Office” is selected. To set up a quick and simple automatic reply, just type a message in the text box, select “I am currently Out of the Office”, and click “OK”. When you wish to stop the automatic replies, simply open the “Out of Office Assistant” again, select “I am currently In the Office”, and click “OK”.

As you can see, in the picture above, you can set up rules in the “Out of Office Assistant”. Using “Out of Office” rules, you can specify settings that will determine when an auto-reply message is sent. Using the advanced features, you can also do things such as set a timeline for the auto-replies to be active.

NOTE: The rules within the “Out of Office Assistant” should NOT be confused with the “Rules Wizard”. Rules that are set up in the “Out of Office Assistant” will still only allow one (1) reply per recipient.

How to set up an Automatic Reply (vacation message) using the “Rules Wizard”

The Outlook “Rules Wizard” can be used for many things, and as you will see, there are many options available to you. However, for our purpose of setting up an automatic reply that can be used as a vacation message, we will only use several specific options.

To set up your vacation message: With your Outlook Inbox messages displayed; click on the “Tools” menu, and select “Rules Wizard”. The “Rules Wizard” window (as seen below) will open. Make sure that the “Apply change to this folder” box shows your Inbox on the Microsoft Exchange Server. (It should, by default). To start your rule, click on the “New” button.

Select “Start from a blank rule”, and you should see the selections as below. “Check messages when they arrive” should be highlighted. Click “Next”.

In the top section “Which condition(s) do you want to check?”, scroll down until you see the choice “received in a specific date span”. Place a check box next to this choice. In the bottom section “Rule description”, click on the underlined words “in a specific date span”.

You will get another pop up window that looks like the one below, (except that the dates will be grayed out. Put a check mark in the boxes to the left of “After” and “Before”, and select the date range for your vacation message to be delivered. NOTE: The first box says “After”, so don’t select the first day of your vacation, select the day prior to your vacation. Likewise, in the “Before” box, make sure that you enter the date you will be returning to work, so your reply goes out through the last day of your vacation. Click “OK”. You will notice that the link, you just clicked on, now shows the date range that you specified. Click “Next”.

In the top section “What do you want to do with the message?”, scroll down until you see the choice “have server reply using a specific message”. Place a check box next to this choice. In the bottom section “Rule description”, click on the underlined words “a specific message”.

A new message window will open. Enter a description in the subject field, and enter your message in the email message area. Click on the “File” menu, select “Close”, and when prompted to save changes, click “Yes”. The link that previously stated “a specific message” should now show the subject line of your vacation message. Click “Next”.

The “Exceptions” window (below), allows you to choose specific criteria to prevent an automatic reply from being sent. If this is not desired, click “Next”.

In this box (below), you can rename your rule. The default name will be the date span that you chose. As you can see I renamed mine to “My Vacation Message”. The “Turn on this Rule” box is checked, by default. If you don’t want to turn the rule on at this time, you can just uncheck the box. Click “Finish”.

You will now see the original “Rules Wizard” box, with your newly created rule listed. To activate or de-activate your vacation message rule, simply check or uncheck the box to the left of the rule name. Click “OK”, and you are finished.

You can keep this rule and use it over and over. To re-use this rule, after the initial setup, you can click on the date link, to change your date span, and/or click on the message link to change the content of your message.