Reading time: 10 min · Last verified: August 2026 · SMTPedia editorial team
Most advice about the out of office message stops at the wording. Pick a friendly line, name a colleague, mention a date, done. That advice is fine as far as it goes, and it ignores the half of the feature that actually breaks: an automatic reply is a mail server answering strangers on your behalf, at any hour, with no one reading what it answers or who it answers.
This page gives you twelve templates you can paste as they are, the exact menu path to switch automatic replies on in Outlook and Gmail, the scope setting that decides whether the whole internet gets your reply, and the standard that says what a well behaved responder is supposed to do. The wording takes two minutes. The settings underneath are where the surprises live.
A working out of office message carries four facts and nothing else: that you are away, the date you are back, whether anyone is covering, and how urgent things reach a human. Then set the scope. In Outlook, replies to people outside your company are a separate switch with its own text, and Microsoft warns it answers “every email you receive, including newsletters, advertisements, and potentially, junk email”. In Gmail, the reply goes to everyone unless you tick the contacts only box.
What Every Out of Office Message Has to Answer
The person reading your automatic reply wants to know one thing: what happens to the request they just sent. Everything in the message either answers that or gets in the way of it. The same economy that makes a business subject line work applies here, because your reply is read in a list, next to twenty other messages, by someone who is already slightly annoyed.
You are away
One clause. Not the reason, not the destination, not the itinerary. “I am out of the office” is the entire requirement.
The date you are back
An actual date, not “next week”. The reader is deciding whether to wait or escalate, and a weekday plus a date settles it.
Whether you are reading email
“I will not be checking email” and “I check once a day” produce completely different behaviour from the sender. Say which one is true.
The route for urgent things
Prefer a shared address over a named person. A team inbox survives holidays, resignations and your colleague’s own leave.
That last point is the one people get wrong most often. Naming a colleague sends every stranger who mailed you straight to that colleague, including the ones you would never have forwarded. A role based address such as support or billing takes the same traffic without volunteering anyone’s name to the entire internet.
Twelve Out of Office Message Templates You Can Paste
Each one is written to be copied and edited in under a minute. Square brackets mark what you replace. None of them explain why you are away, because that is never the reader’s business and it is frequently their leverage. If you want the sign off to match the rest of your correspondence, the same rules as closing a normal email apply.
1. The default
Thank you for your message. I am out of the office until [Monday 14 September] and will not be checking email while I am away. For anything urgent, please contact [team@example.com], which is monitored daily. I will reply to your message after I return.
2. The short one
3. Away with limited access
4. Office closure or public holiday
5. Extended or parental leave
6. Conference or travel
7. Internal version
8. External version, same absence
9. Support or sales handoff
10. Last day in the role
11. Peak season, replies delayed
12. Away with no cover
Two habits are worth keeping whichever template you use. Put the return date in the subject line so it is visible without opening the reply, and keep the message plain. Automatic replies are rendered by every mail client that exists, and elaborate layouts break in exactly the ways that HTML signatures break.
How to Turn Automatic Replies On
The wording is portable. The switch is not: every client puts it somewhere different, and two of them refuse to do it at all for certain account types. The paths below are the ones the vendors publish.
New Outlook and Outlook on the web
Open the View tab, then Settings, then Accounts, then Automatic Replies. Turn the toggle on. Select “Send replies only during a time period” and enter your start and end times, which is the setting that switches the reply off for you at the end. If you want it restricted, tick “Send replies only to contacts”. On a work or school account you also get “Send replies outside your organization”, covered in the next section. Save.
The account type limit. Microsoft states plainly that in new Outlook “Automatic replies are not supported for Gmail, Yahoo, or other POP or IMAP accounts”. If your mailbox is one of those, the feature is not hidden, it is absent. Set the auto reply in the provider’s own webmail instead, or build it with client side rules, which only fire while the program is running.
Classic Outlook for Windows
File, then Automatic Replies. Choose “Send automatic replies”, optionally set a date range so it disables itself, and type your text. On a work or school account the dialog splits into two tabs, “Inside My Organization” and “Outside My Organization”, each with its own message body. Fill both or the external world gets nothing. Microsoft’s own guidance for the external tab recommends choosing “My contacts only” rather than anyone outside the organisation.
While you are in these settings, two neighbouring features are worth knowing, because both are regularly mistaken for automatic replies: delayed delivery, which holds a message until a chosen time, and message recall, which almost never does what people expect.
Gmail vacation responder
In Gmail’s settings, select “Vacation responder on” and fill in the date range, subject and message. Google documents the timing precisely: “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.” To narrow the audience, “To send the reply to your contacts only, under the message, check the box.”
| Behaviour | Gmail vacation responder | Outlook automatic replies |
|---|---|---|
| Restrict the audience | Contacts only checkbox | Internal only, contacts only, or anyone outside |
| Repeat sender | Sent again after four days if the responder is still on | Once per sender per activation |
| Mailing lists and spam | Excluded by Google: spam and list mail get no reply | External scope replies to newsletters and advertisements |
| Two message bodies | No, one body | Yes on work accounts, inside and outside |
Google adds the two exceptions that matter most: “Emails sent to your spam folder or addressed to a mailing list you subscribe to don’t get your reply”, and “In most cases, your reply is only sent to people the first time they message you.” Other clients place the feature elsewhere again, and the email clients directory is the quickest way to find which of them even has it.
The Scope Setting Decides Who Gets It
This is the single setting that separates a tidy absence from a mess, and it is the one people skip because it sits behind a second tab. Internally, replying to everyone is harmless: your colleagues need to know you are away. Externally, you are answering anyone who happens to mail you, and Microsoft says what that means in its own words.
Microsoft, on the external scope: “Sending replies outside your organization will send your automatic reply to every email you receive, including newsletters, advertisements, and potentially, junk email.”
Read that as a rule of thumb rather than a warning about volume. Every reply you send to a list, an advertisement or a spam run is a message from your mailbox to a party you did not choose, confirming that a human uses that address. Contacts only removes most of it. Turning the external reply off entirely removes all of it, at the cost of leaving customers without an answer, which is why the shared address in your internal text matters.
What Your Auto Reply Tells a Stranger
An out of office message is the only email you will ever send without knowing the recipient. It goes to clients, to recruiters, to whoever bought a list with your address on it, and to whoever is preparing a fraud against your company. Everything you put in it is public by construction.
| What the reply says | What a stranger learns | Safer wording |
|---|---|---|
| “On holiday in [country] until 3 March, no email access” | An exact window in which nobody is reading this mailbox, and you are not in the country | “Away with limited access, replying from 3 March” |
| “Contact Sarah Lopez, Finance Director, sarah@…” | The name, role and address of the person who can move money while you are unreachable | “Urgent requests: accounts@example.com” |
| “At [event] in Berlin, back Monday” | Your location, your employer’s presence at an event, and a plausible pretext for a follow up | “Travelling until Monday” |
| Any reply at all | That the address is live and attached to a person | Nothing to fix. That is the trade you accept by using the feature |
The second row is not hypothetical. A request that arrives while the named approver is known to be away, referencing the absence and the handover, is a standard shape of business email compromise, and it works precisely because the target’s own auto reply supplied the cast list. Sender addresses can be forged in ways that look correct at a glance, and the messages that follow an absence are the ones designed to pass every check. Name a shared inbox, not a person, and the pretext loses its anchor.
The last row is worth accepting rather than fighting. Any automatic response confirms a live mailbox to whoever sent the probe, which is one reason your address keeps ending up on more lists over time. That is a separate problem with its own set of remedies, and it is not a reason to skip the out of office message.
The Rules a Well Behaved Responder Follows
Automatic responses have had a specification since 2004. RFC 3834, Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail, exists because responders that answer everything create loops, floods and blocklist entries. Four of its rules explain most of the behaviour you see, and most of the behaviour you should complain about.
Label the message as automatic
The Auto-Submitted header field carries the value “auto-replied”, which the RFC says “SHOULD be used on messages sent in direct response to another message by an automatic process”. It is how receiving systems tell your holiday reply from a human one.
Never answer a null return path
“Responders MUST NOT generate any response for which the destination of that response would be a null address”. Bounce notifications use that empty envelope sender, so this rule is what stops an auto reply and a bounce from answering each other forever.
Reply to the envelope, not the letterhead
“In general, automatic responses SHOULD be sent to the Return-Path field if generated after delivery”, and the From field “SHOULD NOT be used as a destination for automatic responses”. The visible sender address is the wrong target.
Do not repeat, and skip list mail
The same response should not go to the same sender “more than once within a period of several days”, and “a responder MAY ignore any subject message with a List-* field”.
Rule three is why a bulk sender sees out of office replies arrive at the bounce address rather than the visible From address: a compliant responder reads the envelope. If you have never looked at where that value lives, the trace chain in the headers shows the whole path, and the fields themselves are defined by the internet message format standard.
Rule four is where the specification and the products part company. The RFC says a responder may ignore anything carrying a List-Id field, the header that marks mailing list traffic. Gmail applies that idea: list mail and spam get no vacation reply. Outlook’s external scope, by Microsoft’s own description, answers newsletters and advertisements. Same feature, two philosophies, and only one of them is in the standard.
Rule two has the sharpest consequence for anyone running a mail server. A responder that answers forged mail sends unwanted replies to people who never wrote to you, which is the definition of backscatter, and there are blocklists dedicated to servers that produce it. Auto replies are one of the classic sources.
If You Send Bulk Email, Auto Replies Land in Your Stream
Send a campaign in August and a slice of your list answers automatically. Those replies are neither engagement nor failure, and treating them as either distorts your numbers.
Three handling rules that follow from the spec:
Filter on the header, not the subject. A responder that follows RFC 3834 stamps Auto-Submitted with a value other than “no”. Matching on the words “out of office” in a subject line fails on every language your recipients actually use.
An auto reply is not a bounce. The address accepted the message and a human will read it later. Classifying it as a failure removes a working subscriber, which is the opposite of what your bounce categorisation is for.
Do not suppress on it. An absence is temporary by definition, so it never belongs in the permanent list that governs who you may contact. Keep suppression reserved for real signals: complaints, unsubscribes, hard failures.
One benign use is worth mentioning: the reply often names a colleague and a shared address, which sales teams read as free routing information. That is legitimate when the message was solicited. It is also the exact mechanism the fraud described earlier depends on, so if your own team relies on it, assume someone else’s does too.
Mistakes That Show Up Every Season
| Mistake | What happens | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| No end date on the responder | It keeps answering weeks after you are back, telling clients you are away | Always set the time period so the client disables it for you |
| Internal text on the external tab | Customers read project names, thresholds and internal nicknames | Write two bodies, or leave the external one off |
| Pointing at a colleague who is also away | Two automatic replies bounce the sender between them | Point at a monitored shared address instead |
| A vague return date | The sender cannot decide between waiting and escalating, so they escalate | Give a weekday and a date |
| Heavy HTML, images or a full signature | Renders unpredictably and adds nothing a reader needs | Plain text, four facts, one address |
| Setting it on the client instead of the server | Rules only fire while the program is open, so a closed laptop answers nobody | Use the account’s server side setting where one exists |
None of this is complicated, which is why it is worth a checklist: the failures above are the sort of thing you notice a fortnight late, from a client, in a sentence that starts “your email said”. The rest of the courtesies are the ordinary ones covered in email etiquette and in how to write an email that survives filtering.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good out of office message?
One that answers four things in under sixty words: that you are away, the date you return, whether you are reading email at all, and the address that handles urgent requests while you are gone. Anything beyond that is decoration, and anything about where you are or why you left is information you are handing to every stranger who writes to you.
How do I set out of office in Outlook?
In new Outlook and Outlook on the web: View, Settings, Accounts, Automatic Replies, then turn the toggle on and set a time period. In classic Outlook for Windows: File, then Automatic Replies, then “Send automatic replies”. On a work or school account, remember the separate “Outside My Organization” tab, which has its own message and is empty until you write it.
Does the auto reply go to everyone who emails me?
It depends on the scope you choose. Gmail sends to everyone unless you tick the contacts only box, and excludes spam and mailing list traffic. Outlook lets you reply internally only, to contacts only, or to anyone outside the organisation, and Microsoft notes that the last option answers “every email you receive, including newsletters, advertisements, and potentially, junk email”.
How often does the same person get my out of office email?
In Gmail, “in most cases, your reply is only sent to people the first time they message you”, and someone who writes again after four days receives it a second time while the responder is still on. The underlying principle is in RFC 3834, which says the same response should not go to the same sender more than once within a period of several days.
Why does my out of office reply to newsletters and spam?
Because you enabled replies to anyone outside your organisation, and that setting does not distinguish between a customer and a bulk sender. The standard allows a responder to ignore any message carrying a List-* header, which is how Gmail avoids answering mailing lists, but it is a recommendation rather than a requirement, so behaviour differs by product.
How do I set out of office without an automatic reply?
Two ways, depending on why you want it. To signal an absence without answering strangers, restrict the reply to your contacts or to your organisation only. To stop the mailbox looking abandoned without sending anything at all, forward the address to a monitored shared inbox for the period, and tell your team the thread will arrive there. On a POP or IMAP account in Outlook, where automatic replies are not supported, a client side rule is the only built in option, and it stops working the moment the program is closed.
Sources
Setup paths, scope options and account type limits are taken from Microsoft’s Outlook automatic replies documentation. Vacation responder timing, the contacts only option and the spam and mailing list exceptions are taken from Google’s Gmail Help. The responder rules quoted in this page are from RFC 3834, Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail.
About the Author
Alaa · LinkedIn
Email infrastructure specialist with 8+ years of hands-on experience in SMTP, deliverability, and email verification. I’ve configured and troubleshot mail systems across Postfix, Exchange, and cloud relays, managed IP reputation and warmup campaigns, and built verification pipelines processing millions of addresses. My work spans DNS authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI), bounce handling, blocklist monitoring, and compliance frameworks including CAN-SPAM and GDPR. I write every article on SMTPedia to give email professionals, developers, and marketers the accurate, RFC-grounded reference they need.
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