65.3 Creating an Out of Office Rule

An out of office rule is a type of auto-reply rule. When you create and activate an out of office rule, GroupWise blocks out your calendar with All Day Events for the dates that you specify and shows you with an Out of Office status. The Out of Office Rule widget at the bottom right of the client will also change colors when your out of office rule is active.

  1. Click Tools > Out of Office Rule...

    or

    Click the Out of Office Rule widget.

  2. Select Turn on my out of office rule.

    In order for your out of office rule to truly be active, you must select this option and specify a date range. Because the out of office rule is active only within the date range that you specify, leaving this option always selected does not mean that your out of office rule is always active. Your out of office rule expires after the last day in the date range that you specify.

    If you deselect this option before the rule has expired, the All Day Events are deleted from your calendar.

  3. Type a subject for the automatic reply.

    Subjects appear in parentheses after the original message subject in the reply. For example, if the subject is “Out of Office reply” and the message “Budget monitoring” is sent to you, the Auto Reply feature returns the subject “Re: Budget monitoring (Out of Office reply).”

  4. Type the message that you want to appear in the automatic reply. For example, "Thank you for your message. I am currently out of the office. [and so forth]."

  5. (Optional) If you want to reply to emails from outside your internal network, configure the External Users tab, to include:

    • Reply to External Users: This box must be checked for replies to be sent to external users outside of you organization.

    • Who to reply to: Choosing My Contacts Only will only reply to external users in your address book, whereas choosing Everyone will reply to any external sender of mail items to your GroupWise account.

    • Subject and Message: Subject and Message fields should have content as the content from the Main tab does not replicate to the External Users tab.

  6. Specify the dates when the rule will go into effect and when it will end.

  7. Click Save.

Rules that trigger a reply (such as this out of office rule) keep a record of who a reply has been sent to, and ensure that a reply is sent only once to that user.