- In Outlook, enable your out-of-office message, set it to start right now.
- Click Save.
- Immediately see a pop-up asking if you want to turn that off.
WTF Microsoft? Who would ever do that?
I suppose someone might have turned it on for the wrong dates, but 99.99% of the time this is just annoying.
There’s probably a simple explanation for this. My guess is that during testing, people left the setting on and spammed hundreds of people over a period of months without even realising what was going on.
It’s designed to take over when you’re out of office (and not using Outlook anyway). When you get back from your holiday or whatever, you probably want to turn off the auto reply if you use it the way it was designed. I guess they could’ve only shown the banner after Outlook restarts, but then you have to deal with those people that refuse to reboot their laptop for years on end.
Not just testing, it used to be an issue many years ago. I’ve let people know that I’m still getting auto-responses when I know they are back from vacation. It happened to me too and I was reminded by my coworker. Also, the idea is you don’t check the your outlook when you are on vacation. It’s not designed for people on vacation who still check and respond to every email.