How can I set up a Out of Office Reply for outside business hours

Outlook’s Out of Office feature cannot natively repeat every evening and turn off every morning; it supports one continuous start-and-end period, so a recurring after-hours response requires an approved Power Automate workflow or administrator-managed solution.

For a temporary after-hours period

For one evening, weekend, or school break:

1. In Outlook on the web, select Settings → Accounts → Automatic replies.
2. Turn on Automatic replies.
3. Select Send replies only during a time period.
4. Enter the start and end date/time.
5. Select Send replies outside your organization so parents can receive the message.
6. Enter the reply, then select Save.^1^

Example:

Thank you for your email. This message was received outside school hours. I will review it and respond on the next school morning. If this concerns an urgent matter, please follow the district’s established contact procedure.

If available, Send replies only to contacts limits external replies to people in your Contacts list.^2^ This can reduce unintended disclosure that the mailbox is unattended, but parents who are not saved as contacts would receive no reply.

Automatic Replies sends an OOR response only once to each sender during the active period. It therefore will not acknowledge every after-hours message from the same parent.^1^

For every school day

A fixed daily on/off schedule is not provided by Outlook Automatic Replies; Microsoft’s Outlook guidance indicates that recurring activation must be done manually or through a script.^3^

For a work or school account, the appropriate automation service is Power Automate with the Office 365 Outlook connector.^4^ However, the available documentation here does not define a complete, supported flow for this exact scenario—including the required trigger fields, time-zone expressions, weekday conditions, and safe suppression of reply loops—so supplying those details would risk creating an unreliable mail responder.

Ask the school district’s Microsoft 365 administrator to approve or implement a workflow with these requirements:

• Trigger when a new message reaches your mailbox.
• Convert the received time to the district’s local time zone.
• Continue only outside configured school hours and on the applicable weekdays.
• Exclude messages from your own mailbox and automated messages.
• Avoid replying to bulk mail, mailing lists, delivery reports, and other auto-responders.
• Send the response only to the original sender.
• Record that a sender was already answered for that after-hours period, if the district wants OOR-like “once per sender” behavior.
• Test with separate internal and external accounts before enabling it broadly.

Power Automate supports cloud flows triggered by events, and flows can be created from a template, from scratch, or from the Outlook connector.^5^ District policy may restrict Power Automate, external auto-replies, or mailbox connectors, so administrator approval is important before processing parent email through an automated flow.

A simpler alternative is to place the response-time expectation in your email signature. That does not generate another email, but every parent sees the policy whenever you send a message.

References

1. Send automatic out of office replies from Outlook.com or Outlook on the web | Microsoft Support
2. [Web](https://support.microsoft.com/outlook/mail/how-to-set-up-out-of-office-automatic-replies-in-outlook)
3. Automatic replies based on meetings/events - Microsoft Q&A
4. Overview of using Outlook and Power Automate
5. Create flows to manage email