It's summer time and that means it's time for vacations and time to wonder why no one is replying to your messages. Outlook has the capability to send autoreplies in response to new mail and forward some or all of your mail to a different email address. Exchange server includes an Out of Office (OOF) Assistant that was designed for this purpose, and "stand-alone" Outlook users can send autoreplies using the Rules Wizard. With either method, only one autoreply is sent back to each person you receive an email from, regardless of the number of messages they send while the rule is enabled. This is to prevent mail loops and similar server errors.

Setting up the Out of Office Assistant is easy, just open the OOF dialog from the Tools | Out of Office Assistant menu and enter the message you want contained in the autoreply. Click in the "I am currently out of the office" radio button, and if you need to forward messages to a colleague while you are out of the office, set up the rule in this dialog, not in Rules Wizard. The rule will only work when you are using the out of office settings and is disabled when you return to the office. Since OOF runs on the Exchange server, you won't need Outlook open for the rules to run.

When you aren't using Exchange server, first create a template with your out-of-office message. Creating a template is easy, just open a new message and type your reply, then save the message using the File | Save as menu and save it as a template. If you're using Word as your email editor, you'll need to temporarily switch to the Outlook editor to create the template, using the Tools | Options | Mail Format menu, switching back to Word after you create the template.

Next, use Rules Wizard to create a rule checking messages as they arrive. Leave the conditions screen blank if you want to send an autoreply for every message you receive or set up conditions to limit who receives a reply. In the next screen, choose "reply using a specific template" and browse to the template you created earlier. Click Next, setup desired exemptions, click Next again. After you name the rule, click Finish. You'll need to leave Outlook open and have it set up to automatically check for new mail for your autoreply to work.

When you're using Rules wizard, you aren't limited to only OOF replies. For example, you can set up a rule to reply to specific subject lines and use it to automate replies to messages requesting information.

Autoreplies are a powerful tool to help you manage you business, but they aren't without problems and are often despised by other internet users. Before enabling Out of Office replies, set your mailing list subscriptions to "nomail", or be prepared to endure flames from other list members. For security reasons, you should not put your itinerary and date of return in the message; the information might end in the wrong hands.