In order for the Out of Office Assistant to work as you would expect, you need an Exchange-compatible email account in addition to Outlook as Exchange Client software, as well as a Mail Exchange Server which – in contrast to normal email accounts – simply receive your emails Provide retrieval – the task is not only to receive emails, but also to set rules for them.

Large companies usually maintain their own mail servers on which the Microsoft Exchange software (or alternatives) are installed. Such a thing is worthwhile for individuals, freelancers, and single self-employed but usually not.

If you have set up a corresponding e-mail account in Outlook, a new button named “Automatic answers” will now be visible under the “File” – “Information” tab.

Note: This button is only displayed if you have registered an Exchange compatible email account in Outlook.

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In the next dialog box, you can then specify the desired standardized message to be displayed to everyone, as well as the desired period in which you yourself will not answer any messages.

In any case, make sure under which tab you enter which settings and automatic messages. There is a distinction between:

• Within my organization
• Outside my organization

The first point concerns only e-mail accounts that are in your in-house network, while the second point concerns all e-mail accounts coming in from outside.

After activating the Out of Office Assistant, you will see this again every time you open Outlook. In this way, do not forget to disable it when it is available again.

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Now you might think:

“If there is no charge for an Exchange Server, why hire one?”

It is true that only a mail exchange server can offer you the possibility to organize the email traffic in your absence in a way that makes sense. Therefore, the method described here is really just a stopgap that is not actually recommended permanently.

As previously described, the Auto Reply button will only be displayed if we have added an Exchange E-mail account in Outlook. So we do a workaround:

Write a new e-mail with the content that should automatically be sent to a sender as a reply, leaving the recipient line free
In the “Start” tab, go to “Save as”, select “Outlook Template * .oft” as the file format and save the template

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In this example, we simply apply our new rule to all messages that are either directly addressed to us or in which we are in the mailing list. Of course you can handle that as you like and specify everything individually.

Go on:

In the further dialog, specify what should happen to the e-mails and select “Answer this with a specific template”
Click on the link in “a specific template”, and look in the next window for the template you previously saved as such

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You will see in the next dialog window that our rule is expanding and clarifying exactly what should happen when. We could theoretically put an end to it, and finish our rule as it is, or we can refine it a little bit further.

Since it is known that there is an exception for each rule, we also have the option of selecting from a large number of exceptions in the following.

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After we’ve fixed any exceptions, we can now click Finish and name our rule in the last step of our rule.

It also makes sense to come up with a name for it, which afterwards can be assigned from the memory of a certain rule construction (and not just Rule 1, Rule 2, etc.), because maybe someday you will create different rules.

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Well, that’s it.

This approach of using some type of Out of Office Assistant is quite fiddly, as you have seen, and so the whole thing works, of course, the machine on which Outlook is active with these rules will run the whole duration of your absence, since there is no Exchange Server You lose weight.