Preparing your email for the holidays

Filed in archive Business Tips on December 9, 2009

© D'Arcy Norman


Its finally here: VACATION TIME. You're prepping for the holidays, all those cookies and the time off with your family. The greatest thing, no one is going to contact you from work. Well, hopefully. There's always that one guy who is sending you emails on Christmas day. So how can you let people know you're away without actually having to check your email over the winter break?

We're going to do a quick walk-through on how to set-up an out-of-office reply for work email. This email will be a pre-prepared message for your clients and work associates that will automatically go out when someone contacts you. There are walkthroughs for all different kinds of email clients but I'm going to talk about Outlook 2007.

The way Outlook creates auto-responders is by you making a template that it then sends out. So first thing, you need to set-up the message you want. So open a new email file, fill out the title of the email and the message. Then select the "Office" Button, which is the button that looks like the little Windows icon. Then select "Save As". You can name the file anything you want but make sure to select the format you want to save it as. The format you need is "Outlook Template".

Once you've created the auto-response email you get to do the complicated part. (Click here if you want a walkthrough with screenshots.) Now we need to setup a rule to make the templates work. Go to "Tools" and then "Rules and Alerts". Then create a "New Rule", make sure its a blank one. Check messages for "when they arrive". Go to the next screen, select "where my name s in the To box". On the next screen click "using a specific template" and then select the template that you created earlier. Make sure to make an exception either with the title of your email or "if it is an out of office message". You can also name the rule, select it for all accounts, only send to certain people… there's lots of details but select "Finish" and "OK" when you're done!

What do you put in your out-of-office replies?