Set your Out of Office message from your iPhone

It sometimes happens that you leave the office and you’ve forgotten to set your Out of Office message. iGone, an app for the iPhone, lets you recover from that situation and set your Out of Office message from wherever you are. (The next tips will cover how to set the message using an Android phone and OWA.) iGone costs 59p and here’s how it works.

• Pay for and install iGone on your iPhone
• On the home screen of your iPhone go to Settings, iGone
• Enter the account settings  for your email account and your mail server. If you’re an existing client and you don’t know these give us a call and we’ll tell you
• Go to your home screen, find and open the iGone app.
• Touch the screen to enter the text window in the middle of the screen (here it starts with “Thank you for your email…”). Edit your Out of Office message as required and touch Done once finished

• At the top of the screen next to “Set Out of Office” slide the On/Off button to toggle between setting/cancelling the OOF message. The settings are not yet changed, there is another step to complete
• You can save the message currently in the text window as a template. To do so touch the A B or C button next to “Set Current Reply as”
• To use a particular template at a later date, click on the Page icon at the bottom right of the iGone screen and the screen will show you the three templates and you can choose whichever you want
• Once you have chosen or typed your message and identified whether you want to turn it on or off, touch “Save and Set Status”
• Your changes will be turned on at your email server and the iPhone will display a confirmation message
• You must have a phone signal to make these changes

Options you can’t control

Most of us use this in emergencies only and it is great to have it for that. There are Outlook options that iGone doesn’t currently give you, for example:

• No options on typeface and other formatting
• You can’t split your Out of Office to have different messages for internal and external email
• You can’t set your Out of Office with particular start and end times. It’s either on or off until you change it.