Outlook has a great feature to allow assistants to send emails on behalf of their bosses. What is not so nice is that the replies come back to the assistant and not the boss! Therefore, if you have been given permission to send emails on behalf of another person in Outlook when the recipient replies, you have to go through the task of forwarding those replies to the owner. This can make for an administrative meltdown, especially if you are doing this on a regular basis. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had the ability to automatically forward those replies back to the owner? Well there is a message setting in Outlook that can can accomplish this task!
Of course, you first need delegate permissions to send on behalf of another person before you can do this little trick. That is set from the Delegates tab under the menu item Tools, Options, Delegates. To allow send-on-behalf-of, the owner will need to grant permissions on the “Inbox” to either “Author” or “Editor.” If you already have this configured then follow the steps below. If not, follow this link to instructions on Micosoft’s website.
To direct replies from emails sent on behalf of back to the owner, use the Have replies sent to: option. The feature is located in the Delivery options section of the Message Options dialog box. Below are instructions for setting up this option.
- Compose a new email.
- Click View from the menu bar.
- Select the From field from the drop-down list.
- Type the owner’s email address in the From field.
- Type the rest of the email message and add any attachments, if necessary.
- Click View again.
- Click Options.
- Click OK
- Click Close.
- Click Send.
When the receiver clicks the Reply button, it copies the owner’s email address in the To: field. The replies then go directly to the owner rather than delegate.
This is great and the perfect answer to accomplish what I’ve been looking for. One further thought, does there exist any way to automate this process… or can it possibly be done via a script somehow? If anyone knows please drop me a note with the info, it would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for the information in this posting nonetheless, it’s great!
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This is not the behavior for Exchange 2010 SP2. When I send a message on behalf of “Other User”, when the recipient hits “reply”, the reply is addressed to “Other User”. It will not come back to me. In other words, messages sent by the assistant on behalf of the boss will have replies going directly to the boss, not to the assistant, so no need to forward replies on to the boss.