How can you send an autoreponse using Outlook?
January 13, 2007 4:31 PM Subscribe
How can our company use Outlook to send an autoresponse to all customers who email us?
We wish to send an email to all customers who email us saying their reply wil be dealt within two working days, check our website at yadda yadda or phone us on yadda yadda also current special offers are etc.
Unless I'm missing something, under Outlook we can only a) set up a rule, which means that if we have an email conversation with a customer, then every time he emails us he'll get the autoresponse which is v. annoying or b) use the Out Of Office function, which will only contact the customer once a week but means he'll get an email with [Out Of Office] in the reply and with an "Out Of Office" icon if they're using Outlook. Neither of these are really acceptable.
Do we need to buy a plug-in to do this? If so, which one? Or am I missing something and this is doable in Outlook 2006? It seems really basic functionality, and yet it's defeating me.
We wish to send an email to all customers who email us saying their reply wil be dealt within two working days, check our website at yadda yadda or phone us on yadda yadda also current special offers are etc.
Unless I'm missing something, under Outlook we can only a) set up a rule, which means that if we have an email conversation with a customer, then every time he emails us he'll get the autoresponse which is v. annoying or b) use the Out Of Office function, which will only contact the customer once a week but means he'll get an email with [Out Of Office] in the reply and with an "Out Of Office" icon if they're using Outlook. Neither of these are really acceptable.
Do we need to buy a plug-in to do this? If so, which one? Or am I missing something and this is doable in Outlook 2006? It seems really basic functionality, and yet it's defeating me.
If you go to Outlook help and search for "auto reply," they send you to this Auto Reply add-on, which seems to do what you want to do. I assume that since they're recommending a pay service for it, you can't do it within Outlook itself, but I don't know that for a fact.
posted by occhiblu at 4:43 PM on January 13, 2007
posted by occhiblu at 4:43 PM on January 13, 2007
Response by poster: All customers will get an 'actual' response within two working days no matter what they ask, but from the customer's POV 90% of questions are answered on our website, so it's good to point that out if they're just emailing us about certain basic things etc , while from our POV it's good to be able to alert them to special offers and office hours etc.
posted by Hartster at 4:45 PM on January 13, 2007
posted by Hartster at 4:45 PM on January 13, 2007
How do you distinguish between customer e-mails that get the auto-response from those that require an actual, "conversation" response?
I'll just second this. Most companies get this wrong, so you get an auto-response even when you're responding to an support email from the company.
posted by smackfu at 4:51 PM on January 13, 2007
I'll just second this. Most companies get this wrong, so you get an auto-response even when you're responding to an support email from the company.
posted by smackfu at 4:51 PM on January 13, 2007
Depending on who they are, your ISP may have an easier, more reliable way for you to do this (a procmailrc file, for example). I'd recommend checking with them; the ISP I work for does this for free, as do many others. Some have a way for you to set this up yourself via the webmail interface or a self-service console of some type. First-tier technical support may be clueless, but keep digging if you hit resistance and you'll get there. :)
posted by littlegreenlights at 5:01 PM on January 13, 2007
posted by littlegreenlights at 5:01 PM on January 13, 2007
Best answer: If you've got an Exchange server, you could install MailEssentials for SMTP/Exchange from GFI. It not only handles auto-replies, but it'll handle disclaimers for all of your outgoing mail, manages global spam filter lookups for incoming email, handles all sorts of modern options for spam control, and will even do mail forwarding better than Exchange (in my humble opinion) if you've got to deal with a complaince department.
We've been running MailEssentials now for 2 years, and I don't know how I lived without it.
posted by thanotopsis at 9:00 PM on January 13, 2007
We've been running MailEssentials now for 2 years, and I don't know how I lived without it.
posted by thanotopsis at 9:00 PM on January 13, 2007
If you make it so any mail sent to your publicly advertised email address always gets an autoresponse, and you have a private mail address that your actual conversations get sent from, a simple message rule should do.
You could also allocate a response ticket number on initial contact, include something like "[ticket #nnnnnn]" in the subject line of any reply, and not send an autoresponse to any mail including a ticket number in the subject line.
posted by flabdablet at 11:05 PM on January 13, 2007
You could also allocate a response ticket number on initial contact, include something like "[ticket #nnnnnn]" in the subject line of any reply, and not send an autoresponse to any mail including a ticket number in the subject line.
posted by flabdablet at 11:05 PM on January 13, 2007
Response by poster: Thanks for all your help; I've marked thanotopsis as the best answer as that's the solution we'll be using, in part because it will also create standardised corporate email footers (with variables for names and extension number etc), which is something else we want to do centrally.
posted by Hartster at 3:28 AM on January 15, 2007
posted by Hartster at 3:28 AM on January 15, 2007
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by SPrintF at 4:38 PM on January 13, 2007