If you go on vacation you have to leave everything tied and well tied. If you usually communicate with your clients, collaborators and coworkers through email, it will be necessary for you to activate the so-called automatic response messages to notify them that you are enjoying a rest period and that until your return you will not be able to respond to them to manage their request. . Just a few days ago we told you how to activate the automatic reply in Gmail . However, if you use Outlook you will have to follow a different procedure. Setting it up will only take a few minutes. You will see that it is very easy if you follow these tips:
1) If you use Outlook 2010 you will only have to open the program and click on the File menu > Information> Automatic responses .
2) Click on the Automatic responses button and select the Send automatic responses option . A setup menu will quickly be activated. A kind of assistant in which you can write the message you want to send to your contacts.
3) First, yes, you will have to choose for how long you want to send the response from outside the office to the people who contact you. You can select a date range , for example, from the day you start to be on vacation until the day you return. If you do not indicate an end date , you will have to deactivate the sending of messages manually, going back over your steps and modifying the settings.
4) Now you can write your message. At the bottom of the menu you will find a white box in which to add the text, if you want by editing the font, size and colors and entering a link, if you want to redirect your senders to a specific website.
At this point, we have to tell you that you can configure two types of messages . One for those who are within your organization (if you want to tell them that you are away, although they most likely already know) and another for those who are outside, people who do not have to know that you are on vacation, to Unless you have notified them personally.
5) Finally, you also have the option of creating rules so that the automatic response system is as effective as possible and does not become a machine to bombard messages to everyone. Some configurable options allow you to forward the incoming message to another coworker who can respond or take care of the matter for you, have the message forwarded to another Gmail or Hotmail account so that we can review it through our private accounts, delete messages from certain senders or organize messages in folders so that when we return to work we will not find ourselves in an absolutely chaotic inbox.
To add any of these rules (there are dozens of options to classify and manage messages while we are away) you will only have to click on the Add rule or Edit rule button to modify it.
Photo by: Rick Scully and TripShake