Out of office message improvements

摘要

Embodiments of the present invention relate to set of improvements to the out of office assistant that send out of office messages to senders of messages while a recipient is out of the office. One embodiment of the out of office assistant associates an out of office message with a calendar event to ensure the out of office message is sent only for the predetermined time period associated with the calendar event. Other embodiments of the out of office assistant generating different messages to people internal to an organization and people external to an organization, and the out of office assistant allows different rich text formatting for the different messages. In a further embodiment, a persistent reminder reminds the user that the out of office message application is turned on.

主权项

1. A computer storage device, executable on a computing system, including a tangible medium and encoding a computer program of instructions for executing a computer implemented method for providing a plurality of out of office messages associated with an email address of a user, the user being a member of an organization, the method comprising:
receiving, by the computing system, an appointment in a calendar of the user, wherein the appointment is associated with a time period; receiving a first out of office message, the first out of office message associated with a first group of recipients and the appointment in the calendar, wherein the first group of recipients are members of the organization; receiving a second out of office message, the second out of office message associated with a second group of recipients and the appointment in the calendar; receiving one or more first out of office message parameters for the first out of office message, wherein at least one parameter specifies an out of office time period during which the first out of office message is to be sent, wherein the out of office time period is associated with the time period for the appointment in the calendar; receiving an email message from a sender, the sender having a sender's email address associated with the organization, wherein the sender's email address was not added to the first group of recipients by the user; and sending the first out of office message in response to the email message.