Setup auto reply in Gmail | Out of Office or vacation

When you’ll be on vacation or out of office or can’t access internet, then you can use Gmail’s “Vacation Responder” to notify the people that you are out of office or on vacation. Before you go for vacation, you can setup your auto reply message, start and end dates in Vacation Responder. So, when you get mail during that time, the auto reply will be sent to the sender.

Steps

  1. Goto Gmail Settings

gmail-settings-screenshot

2.  Under General tab, scroll down to find “Vacation Responder” section

vacation-responder-in-gmail-settings

3. Select “Vacation responder on”

4. Select start (first day) and end date (last day) of your vacation or unavailability

select-vacation-start-end-dates

5. Enter Subject Ex: Vacation and Message Ex: On Vacation of your vacation reply mail

auto-response-message-setup

6.  If you want to send response to your contacts only, then select “Only send a response to people in my Contacts”, otherwise leave it unselected.

send-vacation-reply-to-only-contacts

7.  Click on “Save Changes” button to save the above settings in “Vacation Responder” section.

Notes: 

  1. The Vacation Responder starts sending replies to incoming mails from 12AM on start date and ends at 11:59PM on end date
  2. If you get multiple messages from same contact, then the auto response will be sent once for the first message. If vacation responder is on even after 4 days, then they get one more auto response for the first message they will send on that day.
  3. Auto reply won’t be sent to your mails in spam folder and the mails to which you subscribed to.

About the Author

SRINI S

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