A system for automatically generating request-specific backup contact information in an out of office message that automatically generates an out of office message with specific backup contact information based on an automatically determined correspondence between the contents of a received e-mail message and one or more responsibilities of the user an e-mail message is addressed to. A user interface object allows a user to specify one or more keywords for each different one of their roles/responsibilities, and to also specify corresponding backup contact information for each role/responsibility. Incoming e-mail messages are analyzed to detect the user's keywords used to identify one or more corresponding roles/responsibilities. Based on this detection of keywords in the received message and the correspondence of the detected keywords with role/responsibility back up contact information in the persistent storage, only relevant backup contact information is retrieved and included in the out of office reply.