Updated: March 31, 2020

More and more people use automatic follow up email reminders to stay in touch with their contacts and make sure they receive replies on all emails. Of course, sometimes a person simply refuses to answer your emails, but on most occasions the person simply forgets about your email or your email gets trapped into a spam folder. This article will show how to setup and send follow up email reminders from Outlook.

Unfortunately, Outlook does not have a built-in follow up reminding engine. It does indeed include a follow-up feature, but the Outlook follow-up function is designed so it reminds yourself about an email (it doesn’t remind your contact to answer you).

The solution is to use an Outlook add-in designed to send follow up emails on your behalf: meet Auto Follow Up for Outlook. This Outlook add-in works with Outlook 2007 or newer including Outlook 2019 (both 32-bit and 64-bit desktop versions) and it will send actual follow up emails that can be read by any other email client software. You can download it from here.

How does it work?

Auto Follow Up will monitor your mail folders for incoming emails. If no reply was received to a given email, during a pre-defined period of time, the add-in will automatically generate a follow up email reminder and send it to the “TO” email address of the original email.

Configuring the follow up emails

Once you’ve installed the Auto Follow Up add-in, there are two ways to add follow-ups:
– configure follow-up reminders for an email that you are currently composing;
– add follow-ups to emails that you’ve already sent.

Adding a follow-up to an email while composing it can be done by using Auto Follow Up button from the toolbar in the Outlook email editor:

The follow-up options are pretty straight forward: you select the recipients which you expect to reply (any recipients, all recipients, these recipients with the option to select specific recipients or TO recipients) and add one or more follow-up emails each with it’s own content and wait time interval:

Add a follow-up email by clicking Add button bellow the follow-up emails list which will bring up the follow-up email editor window where you can enter the follow-up email content and set how long to wait before sending the follow-up email:

Sending the follow up email reminders

When the specified period of time has passed and no reply was received to your email, Auto Follow Up will trigger an alert and you can choose to send the follow-up email or to postpone it:

Optionally, you can preview the follow-up email and make changes to it before manually sending it.

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