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.

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-05-16T20:08:45+00:00

    I've used this Rules setup to automatically reply on Mondays (I work four tens) with mostly good success. I suggest a few changes, though:

    1. Looking for just the first three letters of the day (the only three in the message header) works, but it can pull in false positives as names/emails in the From:, To:, and Cc: boxes are also in the header. I have updated this (for Monday) to autoreply when it sees "Date: Mon," in the header.
    2. If you get automated emails from a specific email address and/or to a specific group of which you're a part, you may want to exclude that address/group ("except if from <address>" or "except if sent to <group>").
    3. In order to avoid a loop, it's also probably wise to exclude emails with "noreply" or "no-reply" in the address or those using the Automatic Replies template.

    Anyway, it's pretty terrible that recursion isn't built in to the standard Automatic Replies option, but this workaround has worked for me.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-04-30T22:57:07+00:00

    How do I also set this to also only reply on certain days? We are closed sunday and monday

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-04-17T17:26:02+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

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-03-26T17:32:14+00:00

    Agreed, this shouldn't be so hard. Had something set up at one pint but the auto reply replied to another account with similar system in place off chance and generated 15,000 emails overnight so not doing that anymore, and then it just stopped working so cant recreate the Powerflow.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-11-22T22:17:29+00:00

    I find it more shocking that people have been posting about this and requesting that it be made a feature since 2017, over 7 years, and it is still not an option for us at this point.

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