How can I set up a recurring automatic reply during specific hours?

Anonymous
2024-01-31T22:31:14+00:00

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.

Outlook | Windows | New Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-07-25T21:49:27+00:00

    Wow! That's hilarious from where I'm standing! Was this the set up you both had? I was just about to set it up but will wait to hear back from you:

    https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/i-need-a-recurring-automatic-reply/4b21dd73-e561-49a4-bd71-1f647d1a48a2

    My outlook rules page does not look anything like the ones in answer posted here. This is from 2 years ago and clearly out of date, but since it is locked we can't tell MS that we need an update to this answer.

    Still waiting on an answer of how to make the recurring out of office replies.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-07-22T23:35:01+00:00

    This is a basic feature that existed 15 years ago. Honestly unbelievable that it has been removed in favour of so many other useless features. It is unbelievably frustrating that the needs of quite literally millions of users is being ignored.

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    10+ people found this answer helpful.
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  3. Anonymous
    2024-07-15T13:59:59+00:00

    Hi Elani,

    How can we set up a recurring out of office message? I see you replied "You can set up a recurring automatic reply during specific hours in Outlook by configuring the automatic replies in the new Outlook client." You also said "unfortunately, there is no easy way to make the recurring automatic reply you need to enable this manually." but did not give the (even if difficult) way in which to do this.

    So I can stop searching for the answer, would you please confirm your answer was incorrect? If so, this would be a great basic feature to have.

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-07-10T17:11:57+00:00

    Like some others have pointed our, I work 4/10 with Friday and the weekend off. I am required to post an out of office email notification for the days that I am out of the office. Manually having to do this for each weekend is tedious and should be automated within Outlook.

    In addition, I think Outlook should be able to automatically provide the OOO response for federal holidays.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-07-08T07:15:28+00:00

    Literally!! I'm shocked Outlook does not have this feature already. They need to get on to it ASAP.

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