How do you set out of office in outlook 2010?

[bigdecisions]

I can't find how to do it ANYWHERE! And can't believe it's not possible!

Please can someone help as I don't want my clients to think I am ignoring them when I'm away!

Thank you

It's in a stupid place !!!

Go to the home tab top left hand corner and half way done in the middle of the page it has a section on out if office

Thanks for replying but when I click on the home tab all the options come across the screen horizontally - And there is no out of office.

If I look down it just shows 'inbox, drafts, sent and then the names of my folders'

Am I being a total idiot?

this link should show you where it is

Sorry - not home it's the first tab but its file

Wanders off muttering about Microsoft stupid naming system

Do you have office professional? "Out-of-office" is a message which needs to be sent to your mail server unless you're intending on going on holiday and leaving your machine on...

Thanks everyone but it's not there :(

dancepony - I have a list of 'account settings', 'mailbox cleanup' and 'rules and alerts' but no option for out of office.

dolomites thanks for your help but I've no idea what you mean! Am panicking a bit!

The Out Of Office only works with an Exchange Server. This is what most people have in a work environment.

Are you using Outlook at home on a personal basis?

Yes - I work from home freelance.

Can I set up an exchange server somehow? Or somehow get an out of office set up?

No, you can't do it on a "home set-up".

Who's your internet host? You should be able to do it on their website.

Thought so. No, you cant set up an Exchange server just like that.

What you can do is create an email template and set a rule to use that template to respond to every email you receive when you are away. I'll find a support article to talk you through it in a minute.

You will need to leave your machine on and Outlook open when you are away, and if you get any spam, it will be replied to with your template which will result in your confirmation to the spammer that you have a live monitored email account which will result in more spam....

Here you go:

How to emulate the out of office assistant

Your call whether you actually want to do this though ....

I work from home so NEVER advertise when I'm away.
Also I have a policy of rarely replying to emails right away so the fact that I'll be by the pool drinking a beer while doing my emails next week will not be obvious to the recipients

I too like Talkin are reluctant to say I am away, as my business address is my home one. However, I sometimes put a generic "I am in lots of meetings/training sessions this week" to convey the message I am not about etc.

I have recently moved to BT to hosted Exchange as I was fed up of not having "work" standard email for my freelancing. So far it has been good. I kept my domain with my web host. It is c£6 a month. business.bt.com/domains-and-hosting/office-365/

Others on here said they'd found Google Apps good and probably cheaper than what I am doing. www.google.com/apps/index1.html

I'm considering cloud backup but am still wary : I like my big memory sticks.

Webmail is less useful to me because between us DH and I have seven live email addresses, some of which are incoming only and we reply from the outgoing ones and they are not all on the same domains : so we use Thunderbird and I back it up periodically.

I do not like using any sort of auto reply email personally.

All the big tech & cloud companies have been hacked "big style" within the last 8 weeks. I would not trust anything sensitive on the cloud - plus then there's the small print - as far as I know, dropbox is the only cloud service at this moment who don't claim to "own" your data.

Personally I use dropbox for stuff which if I lost wouldn't be the end of the wrold (dropbox also syncs with your desktop so you have a REAL copy too in case your network flunks) and I also have an external HDD for all the stuff I'd rather wasn't out there in the public domain.

talkin very interesting point about not wanting to advertise the fact your house is unoccupied for 2 weeks because you're in Marbs!

(123 offer you the option to put your ooo on their exchange server so you don't need to leave your PC on for a fortnight.)