How to Use Out of Office Assistant

Out of Office Assistant is a feature in Outlook made available when using Exchange. It can perform management of e-mail and auto-responses whilst you are away.

There are undoubted benefits of such a facility, yet also disadvantages that need to be understood before deciding whether to implement the facility.

The main things to consider are:

  • The Out of Office assistant will send a response to every sender that tries to send you a mail in your absence. Exchange tries to determine whether the message has come from a distribution list or is spam, but is not always successful.  It is worth noting that some distribution lists do not tolerate the use of Out of Office responses.
  • There has been a lot of discussion in the media recently with regards to security of Out Of Office responses. Letting an unsolicited sender know that you are on holiday and what dates you are away is inadvisable.
  • Consider impacts on Freedom of Information requests.  Advice regarding FOI can be found on the FOI Website

To Configure Out of Office Assistant:

In Outlook, select Tools from the Menu and select Out of Office Assistant

The following window will appear.

OOOA

Select 'I am currently Out of The Office' and add an appropriate message in the Autoreply box below. This will now autoreply to every message you receive.

Should you wish to perform certain actions on messages, such as:

  • Forward mail to another
  • Delete the mail based on content
  • Reply to a specific user with a specific message
  • Move to a particular folder

This facility can be achieved by clicking on the Add Rule button. The following screen will appear:

OOOA Rule

NB. Please bear in mind that the rule facility is further complicated due to the University operating two official e-mail addresses (@ncl.ac.uk, @newcastle.ac.uk). At present rules will have to be created with both. This is subject to change in the future.

Rules are applied from top to bottom in the Rule List, therefore messages that meet two or more rules may be affected by this.

To Remove the Out of Office Funtion:

From within Outlook simply go to Tools and Out of Office Assistant again and select 'I am currently in the Office'