I have been asked by a family friend how you can setup outlook to autoreply to emails for when you are on holidays etc with a preset message.

Seeing I don't nor have ever used outlook it is outside my area of knowledge.

Google keeps turning up http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/outlook/auto-reply.html over and over.

It will indeed do what is desired but $40 seems pretty steep for an auto reply function :/


Is there any free addons that will do the job, or some way of manually setting it up? Or even suggest me an email client that has this function built into it.

Some (maybe even all?) ISP's these days tend to offer an auto reply feature when you log into your account in the services area of their site. Probably worth trying that first. The autoreply feature in Outlook (Express) means you have to leave the PC on with the client running the whole time you're away. Would think any ISP that offer webmail should offer autoreply.

Outlook : Tools -> Out of office attendant.

However you need to have outlook running and accepting emails for this to work.

Ask your ISP if they have .vacation.msg support, or some other method of doing it on the server.

Hrm thanks guys that sounds like a better way to do it :)

Shall look into it.

I have the same problem at work, I too would really appreciate to know if there is a better (read: free) alternative.

Best way to do it really is from the mail server (webmail component normally allows you to set it up for end users), if your work runs it's own mail server, i'd be asking whoever looks after it if it's possible, if they don't run their own mail server, see above re ISP alternative.

last edited by Nailbomb at 19:36:06 17/Jan/08

if hes on an exchange server, he doesn't need outlook running ~_~

For me this is just someone running a small business from their home PC, so thats it there is no network or server.