Lisa said:
When I am trying to turn on my out of office in Outook 2003 I am receiving an
error message "Out of Office Command is not available. See the program
documentarion about how to use this extension." Not sure what has happened
as I have used the out of office before.
What did the help included in Outlook 2003 say about the Out of Office
feature? Bet is said that Exchange (mail server) is required.
If you don't have Exchange then you need to use:
- A rule in Outlook.
- Or a server-side auto-responder.
The best choice is to have an auto-responder on the mail server. This
might be called vacation response or some other name. Use the webmail
agent to your e-mail account to check its options. It might have an
auto-responder and that is what you should use.
If there is no auto-responder provided by your e-mail provider, you'll
have to use a rule; see:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311107
Using a rule also means:
- Leaving your computer powered on. Probably should get a UPS.
- Configuring Windows to restart after a crash.
- Using auto-login so your account logs in to load Outlook.
- Add a shortcut in Startup group to load Outlook.
The above is needed to ensure that Outlook is running and will get
loaded if your computer crashes. However, if a computer crashes and you
have it configured to automatically restart then your computer could
simply crash, restart, crash again, restart again, and so on in an
endless loop while you are away from the computer. Using the auto-login
(so Outlook reloads after a crash and restart) means anyone walking over
to your computer can use your account to do whatever you can. The
startup shortcut is needed to ensure Outlook, a user process, loads
after a crash, restart, and auto-login. That also means everytime you
restart Windows that Outlook will load after you login. When Outlook is
running, you are assuming there is no outage from your ISP. If there is
an outage, you are assuming there is no need to reestablish the IP
address leased to you by your ISP (sometimes DHCP does not renegotiate
after an outage).
Outlook is an e-mail client, not a server. Trying to use it as a
server, especially when the rest of your setup is not designed for
server-level reliability for hardware and services, will result in flaky
operation. So check if your e-mail provider has an auto-responder for
your e-mail account with them.
