It's vacation season and vacation season means a lot of questions from users asking how to enable out-of-office in Outlook.
Outlook's Out of Office feature works only with Exchange mailboxes and my years of experience has taught me that the people who ask this question are not using Exchange.
Learn more about Out of Office Replies
Non-Exchange account users have two choices: create an autoreply with a template rule in Outlook and leave the computer turned on and checking email while you're gone, or log into your email account's online portal and configure a "vacation reply" message.
Using a vacation reply configured on the mail server is preferable to using a template in Outlook. First and foremost, it just works. You don't need to leave your computer turned on and Outlook checking for new mail for it to work. The reply goes out as soon as the message is received by your mailbox, not 10 minutes later when Outlook downloads the message.
