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.
