I’m part time. I don’t use an out of office message, but I do have my hours in my signature, and sometimes include that information in the body of email. Many of the people I correspond with frequently need things turned around quickly – postings for public meetings need to go out so many days ahead of said meeting, and similar. They need to know when I’m available to get the work done!
Oh shoot. You need something and I’m unavailable today. Here’s the good news: you have options.
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There’s nothing worse than dreading a return from being away from the desk. After all, you’re likely to have an overflowing email inbox left untended while you were on vacation. Sending out this one email before you go anywhere for an extended period of time will help lessen that feeling.
Hahahahaha, reminds me of the time the entire giant department (hundreds of people) had to sit through a SLIDE SHOW of a higher up’s trip to Europe, in person. They sent a survey afterwards–thankfully anonymous–and I said it was extremely inappropriate to make us sit through his holiday snaps when most of us can’t go on vacation at all and it was supposed to be a WORK meeting.
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Again, be as specific as possible and provide as much detail as possible on how they can get their questions answered or problems resolved. This will ensure you come back to fewer fires and headaches.
I accidentally left my slightly-more-than-professionally-testy “I am out of the office due to a lapse in government funding” voicemail greeting up for a couple months after funding was restored, oops.
My boss does not understand OOO and thinks I saw his email and sent the reply personally and does not understand why I didn’t answer the actual question.
I mean, sometimes I put up an OOO because I’m on vacation and not checking email. Sometimes I put one up because I’m travelling for work and will only have sporadic access to my laptop, but might get to check once or twice a day. In my role, it’s important to make that distinction. Maybe it’s not so important for other people.
I personally like it. Of course, the emails that I’ve seen still say what to do if the matter is urgent and needs to be handled now — but as a person who gets 100+ emails a day, whether I tell you I’m deleting all of them when I get back or not — if it is in the thousands of emails that might accumulate in the time I am off, I’m not going to see it or respond. Better that I tell you now that you are going to have to resend the email after I return (or get my backup to handle it now) than you sit around waiting for a response that is never going to come. It is actually pretty common in my industry for any absence two weeks or more.
Note: Sending automatic replies to anyone outside my organization will send your automatic reply to every email, including newsletters, advertisements, and potentially, junk email. If you want to send automatic replies to those outside your organization, we recommend choosing My contacts only.
The auto reply only allows you to choose between ‘No-one, Recents, Favourite, All Contacts’. I need it to reply to everyone. Is there a way of doing this?
Note: The following steps are for users with a Microsoft Exchange account. If you don’t see the words, “Connected to: Microsoft Exchange” at the bottom of your Outlook window, check out our article on how to set up out of office in Outlook with an IMAP/POP3 account.
Two to three sentences is usually enough to tell recipients everything they need to know.
If you want to send multiple messages over different days, make sure each one includes all the information above so there aren’t any questions left unanswered. And remember — no matter how much space you give these notes, you still need to leave enough room for actual emails!
So, not the literal first second I’m back at my desk. But as soon as I can, depending on where you land once I’ve taken a look at everything and set some priorities.