How to Auto-Forward Emails in Outlook

Planning a vacation or going out of the office for a few days? During these times, you may want to keep track of important emails that might need your immediate attention. The usual method is to add the work or secondary email address to your phone, but that might annoy you with hundreds of unnecessary emails. In such situations, you can still use the automatic forwarding feature in Outlook mail.

Outlook provides several ways to automatically forward emails to a separate email address. You can also set specific keywords like Notification, Error, Attention, etc. to let the service filter which emails to forward or not.

In this article, we will talk about the two main ways to automatically forward emails to Outlook. Follow the steps below, set the automatic forwarding feature in Outlook and only worry about the important emails in your inbox. We will also talk about how to set auto reply on Outlook.

Note: The functionality of the Outlook desktop app varies across desktop platforms. For this article, we’ll be using Outlook Web to work on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS.

Use Outlook transfer

Using Outlook’s default forwarding option, you can forward all emails from your Outlook mailbox to your primary mailbox. Follow the steps below to configure it.

Step 1: Access Outlook Web on the desktop browser.

2nd step: Sign in using Microsoft account credentials.

Step 3: Tap the Settings icon in the top right corner.

Step 4: Select Show all Outlook settings.

Step 5: The step will open the full Outlook settings window.

Step 6: Go to Mail> Transfer.

Step 7: Activate the forward option and enter the email address to which you want to forward Outlook emails.

Step 8: Toggle the Keep a copy of forwarded messages option on or off and tap the Save button at the bottom.

That’s all. From now on, you will see all Outlook Auto Forward emails to your other email address. But like I mentioned earlier, the practice is to forward all emails and might overload your inbox. To avoid such problems, you need to use Outlook Rules feature to set some email forwarding rules.

Create Outlook Rules

Outlook Rules are one of the best additions to Outlook service. Using Outlook Rules, you can create powerful and customizable rules to spice up the experience.

Step 1: Go to Outlook Web on the desktop browser and sign in using Microsoft account credentials.

2nd step: Tap the Settings icon in the top right corner.

Step 3: Select Show all Outlook settings.

Step 4: The step will open the full Outlook settings window.

Step 5: Go to Mail> Rules.

Step 6: Select the “Add a new rule” option. Add a relevant name to the rule and go to the condition option.

Step 7: You can choose from a set of conditions such as Subject, Keyword, Marketplace with, People, etc. For example, I selected “Subject or body includes” and added Important, Urgent, Error in the “Search word” section.

Step 8: You can add as many conditions as you like in the rule. For example, you can add another condition with “Message body includes” and add the relevant words to search for.

Step 9: After adding the relevant conditions, go to Add action and select Route> Forward to. Select an email address that you want emails forwarded to.

You can also add an exception to a rule. Press “Add exception” and set a separate condition for it. Hit the Save button in the bottom corner and you are good to go.

From now on, whenever an incoming email arrives with relevant subject or body keywords, Outlook will run the rule and act accordingly.

Delete the rules

After your goal is complete, you may need to remove the rule so that Outlook stops forwarding emails in the future. Follow the steps below to remove Outlook rules.

Step 1: On the Outlook web, go to Outlook Settings> Email> Rule.

2nd step: Tap the small delete icon and delete the rule from Outlook.

Set up automatic responses

Outlook also lets you set up automatic replies to let the recipient know that you have received their mail and plan to come back soon with an appropriate reply. Follow the steps below to set up automatic replies on Outlook.

Step 1: Open Outlook Web and tap the Settings icon in the top right corner.

2nd step: Go to Mail> Automatic replies.

Step 3: Enable automatic replies. Select the time period for the automatic reply for Outlook mail.

Step 4: You can also enable the option Send replies only to contacts who ignore emails from other contacts and only send automatic replies to contacts.

I love how Outlook offers a rich text editor to customize your auto reply response. You can play with bold, italic, underline effects, and even use different colors.

Use Outlook like a pro

Outlook is a wonderful messaging service. It works even better with Microsoft 365 subscription because the add-on removes all unnecessary ads from the platform. Besides that, it is packed with useful features like auto delete, auto forward and more using Outlook Rules feature.