Over the next two weeks, many people will have an adjusted work schedule with the upcoming holiday. How do you properly notify your customers and vendors of this change?

Let’s break it up into three categories…

1. Before

2. During

3. After

Before your planned vacation, you can add a little note to your signature notifying your customers of the change of schedule.

Log into your email > Select the wrench near the top right of the page > Select “Settings” > Under the “General tab”, scroll to the “Signature section” > Add the relevant upcoming changes to your signature > Scroll to the bottom of the page > Select “Save changes”

Log into to your web mail, by going to www.outlook.office365.com > log in with your email credentials > Select the wrench from the top right bar > Select “Options” > On the left side, under “layout”, select “Email signature” > Select both boxes if you want to add this signature to all new and responding emails >  Adjust your signature to reflect upcoming changes > Select Save.

Open Outlook > Select “File” > Select “Options” from the left menu area > Select “Mail” from the left menu area > Select “Signatures” from the right side”  > Select the signiture you are currently using > Adjust wording for all signatures which you are using > Select OK

While you are out of the office, set up an auto-responder to notify any incoming emails that you are out of the office/ will have a delayed response and if there is someone they can speak to in the meantime.

Gmail users:
Log into your email > Select the wrench near the top right of the page > Select “Settings” > Under the “General tab”, scroll to the bottom of the page > Select “vacation responder on”  > Select first and last date > Adjust subject and message to your liking > Save changes

Office365 users:
Log into to your web mail, by going to www.outlook.office365.com > log in with your email credentials > Select the wrench from the top right bar > Select “Automatic replies” > Select “Send automatic replies” > Select “Send replies only during this time period” > Select the times you will be out of the office > Adjust the text box to your liking > Make sure the checkbox to send messages to outside your organization is selected > Select the Check/ OK on the top

When you get back to work, you may notice some interesting emails. These could be auto-responders responding to you auto-responder. This is more common with invoices and support related emails.

If you set the auto-responder to go until a certain date, it should automatically go away at that time. If anything changes, go back to the settings area and adjust the date accordingly.