How-To

How to Enable Out of Office Auto-Reply Assistant for Outlook for Mac

By Steve Krause

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Learn how-to enable and configure the Out of Office Auto-Reply feature in the new Microsoft Outlook for Mac client.

With the release of the new Microsoft Outlook for Mac, features like the Out of Office Auto-Reply Assistant are now available to Apple users. For those of us working in a corporate / Office 365 environment on a Mac, this is great news. In this groovyPost, I’m going to show you how to enable the out-of-office feature from the Outlook for Mac client. For those of you on Windows, here’s how to enable the Out of Office Auto-Reply on Outlook 2013 or 2010.

Outlook for Mac – Enable and Configure the Out of Office Assistant

The Out of Office feature of Outlook creates an auto-respond rule to notify people that you’re out of the office or unavailable. To enable it, Click Tools, Out of Office.

The settings are fairly self-explanatory. Simply fill out the automatic reply message and configure the timeframe you want to enable the out-of-office settings. I recommend using this feature vs. manually enabling and disabling the auto-reply as most people forget to turn it off and that just leads to constant heckling from your co-workers.

Use caution when sending replies outside your company

If you use the “Time Period” setting, the auto-reply will disable itself — otherwise, you will need to manually disable the auto-reply once you return to the office.

Notice, in my example, I didn’t set the automatic replies to those outside my organization as the majority of outside email is SPAM. The last thing you want to do is confirm your email address to spammers.