Updated: March 31, 2020

It is always a good idea to auto reply to people that made a payment to you, no matter if it’s a purchase or a donation. It certifies that the payment reached the intended person and it gives you an opportunity to further detail your offer or activity.

However, setting up an auto reply to PayPal payments from Outlook is not really achievable through Outlook internal rules. In this article we will explain why you can’t configure Outlook to auto reply to PayPal payments and how to achieve this functionality using Auto Reply Manager for Outlook.

PayPal payment emails and Outlook

Outlook lets you define rules so certain emails are automatically replied to, but you can only choose to auto reply to the email address of the “From” email field. On the other hand, whenever PayPal sends you a payment email, the email is sent from a PayPal email account (members@paypal.com) “via” the actual email address of the payer:
To put it simple, Outlook doesn’t know how to automatically reply to the actual payer, so all auto replies would be sent back to PayPal (members@paypal.com), making them absolutely useless.

How to auto reply to PayPal emails

You can achieve the desired PayPal auto-reply functionality in Outlook using Auto Reply Manager, an Outlook add-in designed to setup and send automatic emails from Outlook.

Basically, you need to follow these instructions:

1. Download & install Auto Reply Manager;

2. Start Outlook, go to the Auto Reply Manager ribbon / tab, click on Edit Rules and choose to add a new rule:

3. Create a new auto reply rule by selecting to enable auto replies only for emails received from members@paypal.com (this way you don’t auto reply to your other emails):

4. On the rule action tab, select “reply” as the automatic action and enable the box to reply to original sender. This way, the program will not reply to members@paypal.com but to the email address of the payer’s PayPal account:

5. Enter a nice PayPal auto reply text and that’s it. Outlook will now send automatic replies to PayPal payment emails, directly to the actual PayPal user and not to the PayPal generic account (members@paypal.com).

6. This step is optional and it applies only if you chose to insert a personalized greeting line to your PayPal payers. To avoid replying with greetings such as “Hi Diane via PayPal”, click on the Settings button of the Greetings area and enable the option “cleanup names”. This way, Auto Reply Manager will add the greeting “Hi Diane” and it will exclude the “via PayPal” part.

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