Coping with Out of Office Autoreplies

Users of Microsoft Outlook with a Microsoft Exchange Server email account will know that they can use the Out of Office Assistant (in the Tools menu) to automatically send email replies when they are away. But what should you do with all those Out of Office replies that clutter your Inbox when other people are away?

Well, the bottom line is that you don't really need OOF messages landing in your Inbox, but you do need to know when you get one so you can either send your email to another person or know to expect a belated response.

So here's what I do. I've created a rule to instantly move all Out of Office messages to a new folder and play a sound that helps to catch my attention. This rule also then marks the message as read and displays a Desktop Alert. (note: I have Desktop Alerts switched off for all but very important events so the arrival of one of these is generally guaranteed to catch my eye, especially since I changed the display duration to the maximum of 30 seconds.)

Here's what it looks like when it's set up in the Out of Office Assistant:

And the beauty of this approach is that I can easily store all of my OOF messages in this folder for later review. If, for example, a week later I start wondering if Eileen is ever going to return from holiday, I can easily pop into the folder and read the last OOF message I received from her mailbox. Nice and neat and tidy. Just like Outlook should be!