Whether you’re out of the office on a month-long beach vacation or in a half-day training without email access, Outlook’s Automatic Replies can be used to automatically notify senders that you’re not available to respond to your messages for a period of time.

You might also hear this feature referred to as an “out of office reply,” “OOF message,” or “vacation responder.” Automatic Replies takes just a moment to set up and can help eliminate confusion or excessive emails while you are out.

We’ve got two videos to explain Automatic Replies in Outlook, because the steps Outlook 2013/2016 steps are different from the Outlook Web App steps. First up, Outlook 2013/2016:

This next video shows how to set up Automatic Replies in the Outlook Web App, if you’re using using Office 365 via your web browser:

Not using Office 365 at work? Check out Microsoft’s instructions for “How to enable Automatic Replies in non-exchange account.”