If your outlook haven’t connected to an Exchange Server, the above method will not work. In this situation, the Manage Rules & Alerts function of Outlook can help you to set out of office auto reply as following steps:
1. Click Home > New E-mail to create a new message, type the subject and message as you need
2. Then click File > Save As, choose a folder to put the message, and then click Save as type drop down list, and select Outlook Template.
3. And then click Save to save the message.
4. Then click Home > Rules > Manage Rules & Alerts,
5. In the Rules and Alerts wizard, click E-mail Rules tab, and select the email account that you want to apply the out of office setting from Apply changes to this folder, and then click New Rule.
6. In the Rules Wizard, click Apply rule on message I receive from the Start from a blank rule section.
Click Next button, check sent only to me from Which conditions do you want to check?
8. Go on clicking Next:
- (1.) Check reply using a specific template from What do you want to do with the message?
- (2.) Then click a specific template hyperlink in the Edit the rule description section.
- (3.) And a Select a Reply Template dialog box will appear, select User Templates in File System from Look in drop down list, and then click Browse button to choose the folder that you put the auto-reply message, and the message you created just now have been inserted. Then click Open to finish this step.
9. Go on Next, in this Are there any exceptions step, you needn’t check any item.
10. And click Next, enter a name for the rule in Step1 section, and specify the rule options as you need in Step2 section.
11. And then click Finish button to finish setting this auto reply rule. And when you receive some emails next time, the Outlook will reply them automatically at once.