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Automatic Replies & MailTips

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“Did you get my last email?”

Have you ever sent an email to someone and wondered why you haven’t had a response? Is that distribution group you asked a question to ignoring you? Chances are you’ve encountered people who aren’t making best use of automatic replies and MailTips…

Helpfully, both Live@edu and Office 365 for education, because they both make use of Exchange Online, have the ability to allow users to set little reminder prompts on individual mailboxes and distribution groups to give senders a little pre-warning or useful tip prior to them sending that all important email.

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Here are just some situations where an automatic reply or MailTip can really save the day:

  • Asking a question to your tutor that needs an urgent response in order to meet a coursework deadline, but the tutor is on holiday for three days.
  • Accidentally sending a piece of confidential pupil data to someone outside of your school.
  • Attaching a 10MB zip file of photos of your cats to a distribution group containing 1000 recipients.

The great thing about it is that automatic replies don’t just apply to emails; they even translate across to Lync. As you can see below I’ve got Damon in my Lync contacts and at a glance I can see that he’s set his status to “Out of Office” and set an automatic reply, or vacation response, OOF notification, etc. telling me that he’s going to be away until tomorrow. Immediately I know that if I have something urgent I should contact someone else or expect a delayed response.

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You can find out more about how to configure MailTips on Outlook Live Help, as well as information on Automatic Replies.

Lastly – have you ever wondered why some people refer to being “out of office” as OOF rather than OOO… Well here’s the answer!

Do you use MailTips and Automatic Replies?

Tell us your best practice tips for avoiding disappointment by using MailTips and Automatic Replies in the comments!