How to set up an automatic vacation response in Yahoo! Mail and GMail?

Posted on April 5th, 2007.

Have you ever received an automatic message from your email contact, saying that he is not at home and on vacation, so that you do not expect quick reply until your friend backs from vacation. Most of free email providers provide this function to the users. In Yahoo Mail, the steps are not very hard. Below are the instructions.

After logging in to your account, click on the “Options” at the right side of the page.
At the options page, look for “Vacation response” under Management column. Click on the link.
Then, set your vacation’s duration and your message. You can also set optional response for a specific email address domain.
Click “Turn Auto-Response On” button at the bottom. And now you are done.

If you are using GMail, please follow these steps:

After logging in to your Gmail account, click “Setting” on the top of the page.
From the “General” tab, select “Vacation responder on” in the “Vacation responder” section.
Set the subject and your message
If you want to response only to the people in your contacts, tick the “Only send a response to people in my Contacts” option.
Then, click “Save Changes” and you are done.

Please take into account that no time frame setting is required in Gmail. Therefore, please don’t forget to deactivate the vacation responder after you are back from your holiday.

Okay, it is time to pack your bag. Happy Holiday!

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6 Responses to “How to set up an automatic vacation response in Yahoo! Mail and GMail?”

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Thanks for sharing.

maria
April 5th, 2007

I’d recommend to not do this at all.
E-Mail is not an immediate response communication media. just in case you are away, have someone answer your e-mail for you or simply do it once you return.

Those vacation/out-of-office messages are annoying.

Conficio
April 7th, 2007

thanks for the info, never heard about it before..heh

Bat
April 10th, 2007

@Maria: No problem. sharing is the main purpose of this blog.

@Conficio: I do think that this is vital part of email communication. If you use that email address for your product support, and you are out for vacation for two weeks. What will your customers think if you do not reply their emails after two weeks? If you set up this, at least the customers know that they expect reply after two weeks.

@Bat: I’ve heard about this, but never use it.

korokmu
April 12th, 2007

i think it is not recommended to turn on auto-response because by doing this, you will get more spams.

CypherHackz
April 15th, 2007

how does this function will attract more spam? I don’t have any idea about that. Can you explain further?

korokmu
April 15th, 2007

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