How to set up Automated Vacation Reply in Hotmail

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If you have decided to go on a vacation and don’t have net access or you don’t want to be disturbed during vacation, Hotmail provides you with an option to send automated replies to all the mails received during your vacation period. This is one of the popular features on Hotmail.

Enable Automated Vacation Reply

Let us see how to set up these automated vacation replies. Open your Hotmail account and from the top right corner, click on Options > More options.

Hotmailopt thumb How to set up Automated Vacation Reply in Hotmail

Then under ‘Managing your account’, click on ‘Sending automated vacation replies’.

autoreply1z thumb How to set up Automated Vacation Reply in Hotmail

You will find this opening up.

autoreply2az thumb How to set up Automated Vacation Reply in Hotmail

Check on ‘Send vacation replies to people who e-mail me’, and type the text or message you want to send to people. Click on ‘Save’.  This is the message that will be sent as an automatic reply to any mail received, while you’re away. You might want to include information like, when you will be returning or maybe even whom to contact in the office in your abscence.

If you recollect, some time back Microsoft had disabled this Automatic Vacation Reply feature in Hotmail, some time back, for a while, in order to fight and control spam. But Microsoft soon bought back the feature, once they had introduced some anti-spam measures.

So, don’t forget to select ‘Only reply to your contacts’. This will ensure that you don’t end up replying to just anyone.

Once you are back from vacation, do not forget to click on ‘Don’t send any vacation replies’ and Save. Hotmail may even remind you about this when you sign-in next time.

That’s all you need to know about it – so go ahead and make use of this cool Hotmail feature!

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The author is a Microsoft MVP, a Technology Enthusiast and a Mechanical Engineer. He is interested in anything technical and is committed to Microsoft technologies and products. He is actively associated with various Microsoft online communities, forums, Newsgroups and has been actively involved in Beta testing various Microsoft products and bug submissions.

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  • http://www.iamlee.com/ Mister Lee

    Hotmail doesnt send vacation replies to Junk mails or newsletters regardless of the option. So appropriately, by selecting “only to contacts”, you are protecting your privacy by not sending out information to “emails from non-contacts”, NOT junk mails.

  • http://www.thewindowsclub.com Anand Khanse

    Thanks for the clarification! :)

  • Vasudev

    Thanks Mister Lee, I should have claified that. Yes it doesnt auto send vacation reply to junk mails but mails which are unwanted, which might be spam also that gets landed in Inbox by any chance, if gets auto replied then has a chance of getting even more junk e-mail in future.

  • http://www.iamlee.com/ Mister Lee

    agree with you. but however we need to not that the broader category is “emails from non-contacts”. “JUNK” is a jargon, almost like a keyword, so if u use that the angle gets narrower.

    However even though the message gets land to inbox, not necessarily vacation reply is send. junk itself has two double filtering, HIGH and MOST. so if the setting is MOST “to junk folder” in junk rules, the rest junk which goes to inbox still has hidden flag “junk”, and hence vacation replies arent sent to it.

    i hope its simple to understand. its all about how and not junk is handled by hotmail mechanism. Im talking based on how it works under the hood. and if we simply talk based on very normal users concept, yes definitely i agree with you.

  • Vasudev

    Yes, agreed. You meant , ‘Standard’ and ‘Exclusive’ filter levels. By default its ‘Standard’ (or ‘Most’ as you said). And its good to check occasionly junk folder to make sure good mail don’t get land there by mistake.