If you are using Microsoft Outlook and are leaving for a vacation for some days, you must be wondering how I let everyone who e-mails me know that I will be out of office for so many days! Microsoft has created an in-built function to create an out-of-office message.
In this article I will go through the steps required to create an out of office message for Outlook 2003. First I will show you how to make a vacation response template and save it.
Step 1: Open Notepad or Word Pad and write down the response you want to send everyone who contacts you during your vacation.
Step 2: Save the file in the location shown below and remember to save the file as .oft file. If you save it as any other file it would not work.
Save the file at the following location: C drive – Documents and Settings – Your name – Application Data – Microsoft – Templates.
Save the file as .oft extension in the templates folder. Now you have created the template for your vacation response! See it was not so hard so far!
Now we will go through steps to start a vacation response on your outlook.
Step 1: Open Microsoft Outlook and go to Tools options on the top menu bar.
Step 2: In Tools menu, go to “Rules and Alerts” option and click it.
Step 3: Click “New Rule” button and then click “Start from blank rule” button.
Step 4: Select the first option “Check messages when they arrive”.
Step 5: In the next step you can specify any condition for which you want to send the response. If you do not select anything it would send the response as default to every email that arrives in your email. This is mostly the default option that most of them use.
Step 6: In the next step you will select “reply using specific template” under the tabs actions.
Step 7: Now go to edit rule option on the lower portion of the window where you will click the specific template and show the path of the .oft file that we had created earlier.
Step 8: In the next step provide any exceptions if you don’t want to send the automatic response for certain cases. Most of the people keep it blank, so don’t worry if you keep all the exceptions unchecked. If you want to send response to everyone, no exceptions should be checked.
Step 9: Type the desired name of the rule and click create this rule on all accounts if it applies to you.
Click finish and you are done! This seems like a lot of steps and work but once you know how it is done it will take couple of minutes to set it up. Also you can always edit the .oft file in future to change the dates on that file. You do not have to create new file every time you go on a vacation.
I hope this will help you to create out of office response in future.
