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Out of office message, and everybody who receives it

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 9 min read

Searching for an out of office message starts as a search for wording — something that sounds professional and does not take twenty minutes to write. The wording matters less than one fact about the audience, and Microsoft states that fact plainly inside its own instructions.

That single sentence reorganises the task. The question is not what sounds right but what am I comfortable telling an unknown number of strangers, repeatedly, for two weeks.

Outlook is built around exactly that distinction, and it is the feature people use least.

The same three questions have different answers on the other big mail system, and one of them is a genuine difference rather than a different menu. Google’s vacation responder also answers each sender once — “in most cases, your reply is only sent to people the first time they message you” — but it does not then stay quiet indefinitely: someone “can get your reply more than once if” “the same person contacts you again after four days and your automatic reply is still on”. A colleague who writes in week one and again in week two gets two replies, which is a decision rather than a fault. Two other rules go with it. The end is built in — “your automatic reply starts at 12:00 AM on the start date and ends at 11:59 PM on the end date, unless you end it earlier” — where Outlook leaves it running until you stop it. And part of the audience is excluded by a rule rather than by a setting: “Emails sent to your spam folder or addressed to a mailing list you subscribe to don’t get your reply.” Those are Google’s rules for Gmail; Microsoft’s, quoted above, are Outlook’s, and neither describes the other.

Now the mechanics, which are short. In Outlook on the web and Outlook.com: Settings › Account › Automatic replies, turn the toggle on, and — this is the part to do — tick Send replies only during a time period and enter a start and an end.

Microsoft is explicit about what happens if you skip it: “If you don’t set a time period, your automatic reply remains on until you turn it off.” That is the auto-reply still running in March, telling everybody you are back on the fourth of January. Setting the end date takes ten seconds and removes the only genuinely embarrassing failure mode of this feature.

In classic Outlook the route is File › Automatic Replies › Send automatic replies, with the same optional date range and the two tabs described above.

And if the button is not there at all, that is not a fault. Microsoft: “If you don’t have Automatic Replies after selecting File, you might be using a Gmail, Yahoo, or other POP or IMAP account that doesn’t support the Outlook Automatic Replies feature.” Automatic replies are a server-side feature; an account that Outlook is only reading from cannot answer mail while your computer is shut. The alternative Microsoft offers is a rule — which does work, and only “if you leave Outlook running while you’re away”, which is a meaningfully worse arrangement.

A note on the phrasing, because the second commonest search names the program: an out of office message outlook is the same document as any other, with one difference that matters — Outlook is where the inside-and-outside split actually exists as two separate boxes. In mail systems without that split there is one message, and it is the outside one whether you wrote it that way or not.

One last thing worth deciding rather than defaulting: whether to say that mail will be deleted or ignored. If nobody is covering and you genuinely will not read a fortnight of backlog, saying so is kinder than the silence that follows a promise to reply. If somebody is covering, name them and their address rather than “my colleague” — the point of the message is to save the sender a second email.

The guides below take it four ways: setting it up, what to write, the versions and accounts where it works differently, and the rest of what a message carries when it leaves you.

Not covered here. It will not give you fifty templates. Three lines cover it, and the hard part is deciding what not to say.

It will not treat the reply as internal. Microsoft says the external version goes to every sender including junk, and everything in it is therefore public.

And it will not skip the end date. Without one, Microsoft says the reply runs until you turn it off — and that is the one failure people actually remember. What holds instead is simple: who receives an external automatic reply, and the date-range behaviour, are quoted from Microsoft’s own documentation.