Computer Tip of the Day "08-11"

Managing E-mail while out of the Office.
Even when you're away from the office for a vacation, your e-mail doesn't take a break. If you don't have a strategy for handling these incoming messages, people may be expecting you to respond, which could be a problem. Fortunately, several easy strategies can help you handle e-mail when you're away.
Jim Boyce, author of Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Inside Out by Microsoft Press, offers several ways to tame e-mail while you're away. If it's important to stay connected to the office while you're out, you can use several methods to access your inbox remotely. This makes it easy to respond to or manage e-mail messages when you're away from your computer at work.
Jim Boyce also explains how to set up your e-mail to respond to senders automatically with a reply message that you create. This keeps your colleagues from wondering why you haven't responded, and lets them know who to contact in your absence. Learn how to use the Out of Office Assistant in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. Also, see how to create a custom rule that turns the Out of Office Assistant on or off at your convenience.
Using the information that follows, you can learn to manage e-mail while you're away, instead of letting it manage you.
Access your mailbox remotely (Article)Outlook expert Jim Boyce explains the different ways to access e-mail when you're away from your computer at work.
Manage e-mail from outside the office with Outlook (Article)Jim Boyce provides different strategies for using Outlook to handle your incoming e-mail messages while you're away.
Automatically reply to incoming messages while out of the office (Article)Learn how to activate the Out of Office Assistant in Outlook.
About managing your Inbox automatically while out of the office (Article)See how you can use rules to customize the way that Outlook handles e-mail messages while you're out of the office.
Turn an Out of Office Assistant rule on or off (Article)Control the rules you apply to the Out of Office Assistant.