How to create a rule to automatically tentatively accept and send an email response to meetings scheduled outside of working hours?

Question

In Outlook, there is the option for 'Working hours'. I set mine as M-F 9AM-5PM. When people in my organization are scheduling a meeting, they get a notification that it is outside of my working hours, but most people ignore it. Also, people outside of my org I think do not see this.

I want to 'tentatively' accept any meeting sent outside of working hours with a response saying something along the lines of 'this is outside of my working hours and I will be glad to join if you have pre-arranged this with me, otherwise please reschedule during my normal working hours.'

Any idea if this can be achieved?

Answer 1

I don't believe this is possible with just the basic rules. It is, however, possible with VBA/VBScript. A programmer can write a custom script to respond to a meeting request automatically and this can be customized quite a bit. Once you have a script, you would need only a rule set up which fires the script anytime you receive a meeting request. But you'll need someone familiar with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) if you are not. There may be scripts already existing on the web which can do this or be easily adapted to do this. But again, you'll need someone knowledgeable in this to set it up for you.