It is polite to reply to every received message, even if you don’t have a time to process the message. For example, if you receive a lot of CVs, you can automatically reply to every message, and, just when you have a time, process them and send an appropriate e-mail with the detailed information.

The “Automatic Replies (Out of Office)” or “Out of Office Assistant” feature is not available on non-Exchange accounts, such as Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail), POP3, IMAP. However, you can combine an Outlook email template with Outlook rules to simulate the functionality of the “Automatic Replies (Out of Office)” feature. Don’t forget to leave your Outlook running!

Sometimes when you create a lot of e-mails with the same text, subject or for the same recipient, it will be useful to create a template and then open it regularly, just add some specific information like numbers for regular report and send it:

To customize an automatic reply in MS Outlook, first, you need to create a template of e-mail message that will be send according to custom rules. You can use a template, also, when you need to send messages regularly such as some reports, if it contains the same text, subject or recipients and just need a little modification.

These five simple customizations of Microsoft Office Outlook mailbox view will save you a lot of time and improve the overall productivity.

E-mail communications is not plain text anymore and people want to send/receive well-designed email messages. There are many paid services that allow you to create a visually appealing e-mail template, but you can create it yourself using only Outlook.

If you frequently sign your messages using not only by your name, but also add an extra information such as your job title and contact information, you'll appreciate Outlook's Signature feature. Also, you can add to the signatures icons with links to your profiles or personal pages in Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites.

Outlook can display either the number of unread e-mails or the total number of e-mails in a folder alongside the folder name.

This option controls which address book you see when you open the Address Book (via clicking Ctrl+Shift+B) and when you click the To, Cc, or Bcc buttons when composing e-mails.

This tip shows how to delete holidays and events from your calendar. See also How to add country holidays to the calendar and How to add custom holidays to the calendar.