As technology has become more a necessary part of out lives, email has become a very important communication medium. While this is great, email is not always available. Unlike a phone call where the caller immediately knows that you are not currently available, a sender has no way of knowing if you have received your email or not. If you know you will be unavailable from email, you can create an autoresponder to let people know that you have not received their email. This article will provide direction for setting up an email autoresponder in Microsoft Outlook 2007.
While Outlook provides this feature natively when you are connected to an Exchange Server, it requires a little work when using a POP3 setup. Follow the following directions, and it can be quite simple.
First you will need to create a message template. This is the message that will be sent as an autoreply when you receive a message. Click on the file menu and choose New --> Mail Message. Then you will want to click on the options tab, and in the format group, choose Plain Text. Once you have set the format to plain text, you will want to type the message that will be sent as an autoreply. Ideally, this message should indicate that you are currently unavailable, and when you expect to return. It could also include an alternate method of contacting you, or contact information for someone else that can be contacted should the need arrive. Once you are happy with the message, click the Microsoft Office Button and choose Save As. Change the Save as type to Outlook Template, and give it a meaningful filename.
Now that you have created the message template, you need to configure Microsoft Outlook to automatically send this message when an e-mail is received. Click on the Tools menu and choose Rules and Alerts. Then click New Rule. Choose Start from a Blank Rule and then click Check messages when they arrive. Then click next to advance to the next screen. On this configuration screen, you will want to check sent only to me under the Which condition(s) do you want to check? option. Then click next. You will then be presented with an dialog box telling you that this rule will be applied to every message that you receive. You want to click yes to this message. Next, you need to configure the section labeled What do you want to do with the message? Select Reply using a specific template and click on the words a specific template in the lower box. A dialog box will appear to allow you to choose a template. Choose the autoreply template you created earlier. Click Next to advance to the next configuration screen. You now have the option to configure any exceptions to this rule. Since this is an autoreply, generally you will not want to set any exceptions. Click Next and create a name for this rule before clicking finish.
You have now completed the steps to create and configure an autoreply rule in Microsoft Outlook 2007. In order for this rule to function properly and send autoreplies, Outlook needs to remain running and be configured to automatically check for new messages periodically. Also, this message will only generate an autoreply one time for each unique email address that you receive a message from. Once outlook is closed and reopened however, this is reset and addresses that have already received autoreplies will receive them again. One other important thing to remember is to turn this rule off when you are back in the office so it will not longer send autoreplies while you are in the office.
