How-To: Set an Out of Office Message in Outlook

When you take a vacation or are unable to access your email for a period of time, setting an Out of Office message informs recipients and helps keep things running smoothly in your absence. Here's how to set up this feature in Outlook.

Step-by-step guide

1. Open the Outlook app and click on “File” in the top navigation bar.

2. Select “Automatic Replies (Out of Office).”

3. This brings up a pop-up window. In this window, click “Send Automatic Replies.”

4. Select “Only send during this time range” and choose the dates that you will be out of the office.

5. Below the date range, there are two tabs: "Inside my Organization" and "Outside my Organization." This allows you send different Out of Office messages to recipients inside and outside CCI.

6. In each tab, type your out of office message. If using the same message for both inside and outside the organization, you can copy and paste the text to the second tab.

7. Note: if you are accessing Outlook via the web, Out of Office messages are in a different place. 

   1. Click the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner and hit “Automatic Replies.”

   2. You will see that the text box for writing the message to people inside the organization is above the text box for writing the message to people outside the organization.
      
      

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