One of the great features of using Gmail or Gmail for your domain is the auto responder. This past week in particular, between training days and increased time spent out of the office, I’ve been using the auto responder to inform clients and regular correspondents that I’m away for a few days / hours and will reply to their mail on return.

What is an auto responder you say? It is an automatic response issue on receipt of an email. The sender of the original mail gets an automatic response from your mail host with a pre-set message, as outlined below.

Want to know how to set yours up?

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings along the top of any Gmail page.
3. From the General tab, select Vacation responder on in the Vacation responder: section.
4. Enter the subject and body of your message in the Subject: and Message: fields. If you’ve enabled a personalized signature in your settings, Gmail will automatically append it to the bottom of your vacation response.
5. Check the box next to Only send a response to people in my Contacts if you don’t want everyone who emails you to know that you’re away from your mail.
6. Click Save Changes.

While the vacation responder is enabled, you’ll see a banner across the top of any Gmail page, displaying the subject of your vacation response. To stop Gmail from automatically sending the response, click end now within the banner. Or, if you’d like to edit the response, click vacation settings. (via)

Working online, I rely an awful lot on email and email access. With a regular flow of content through my inbox and a regular line of people looking to contact me, I think it’s only good practice to let people know you’re unavailable to return their mail at a particular time. If you drop me an email and I’m unavailable you’ll have a quick automatic mail delivered telling you politely that I’m unavailable, telling you when I’m back and that I’ll reply to your email on return.

In dealing with a lot of journalists (who tend to go on holidays every now and again), one useful tip to include in your responder message is an alternative contact i.e. who (if anyone) to contact in your absence. That said you can use it for anything - include links back to your website, maybe simply use an autoresponder to thank people for emailing you or submitting a query from your website.

If you haven’t yet discovered the automatic responder / vaction responder in Gmail, give it a look today. It’s a very handy tool indeed!

Popularity: 25% [?]