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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
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Hello,
Is there an update on the ability to make this recurring? A current, and much needed, trend is for people to establish boundaries and expectations around email correspondence. It seems that this would be something Microsoft could support.
Please considering allowing reoccurring options, similar to that found on the calendar.
Keith
How do I also set this to also only reply on certain days? We are closed sunday and monday
Disagree--I believe in the adage "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
I would just communicate with customers the opening times clearly.
and if opening times change, I'll set an autoreply for the entire week before hand, with a message, that the opening hours are changing.
so that not only people that reply during closed hours recieve it, but everyone.
and then, of cours,e I will never open the mailbox during hours we are closed, and definitely never reply. (because once you do, they're going to expect it)
You can try with Power Automate, search for Recurring Autoreply and it will help you set up a flow for this. I just created it (I don't work on Mondays) but not tested yet, hope it works.
I just wonder how to stop it (hopefully it stops automatically???) when I set up a classic OOO autoreply when I'm e.g. on annual leave a whole week including Monday, I don't want it to send 2 autoreplies on Mondays now - if anybody knows more on this please let me know!