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I work in an industry where my clients may require urgent assistance outside of normal business hours. My business engages a third party to handle after-hours emergencies on behalf of the team, but we often receive complaints that clients cannot easily access the after-hours emergency contact number, despite it being available on our website and our after-hours voicemail. In most cases, clients will call the team and disregard the voicemail, then follow up with an email complaining that we're unavailable.
It would be beneficial to have the option to set up an automatic reply where the after-hours contact information is sent to clients when our staff are emailed between 5pm and 8:30am, 5 days per week.
I have tried using the rules feature and fiddled around with the automatic reply feature, but neither would allow me to set up a recurring automatic reply without setting a start and finish date/time. I also checked whether it's possible to synchronize an automatic reply with my calendar block-outs, but this wasn't possible either.
Any guidance would be appreciated.
Using New Outlook on Windows for personal email, calendar, and contact management
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We're in 2025 and we seriously still can't set a re-occuring automatic reply for the same time each day? Terrible.
I haven't worked part-time before but will have a special schedule for the upcoming weeks and just realised it's not possible to set a schedule for out of office replies the way I assumed it would be. This is unbelievable tbh! I can make a calendar event repeat with incredibly specific detail, but I can't schedule an out of office reply for two non-consecutive days?? Microsoft - what are you doing?!
There is a way to do it using Microsoft Power Automate (automatic flows).
This link explains it: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/set-up-recurring-automatic-replies-senn-chiee-lim/
I was finally able to have it set automatically for every friday to monday.
Cheers!
I clicked the link and CoPilot helped set it up. I have it turned on and ran a test, we will see tonight how it works.
I too would love a feature like this to be introduced. It would make my life a lot easier.