You can now set an automatic response to let your contacts know about your availability. If you are going on vacation and don’t have an Internet connection? No problem! Gmail users can give their contacts an immediate response to let them know you won’t be able to get back to them right away.
Easily set up a vacation response in your Gmail settings that will automatically reply your e-mails with an automated response. While the vacation responder is enabled, Gmail will send a response to anyone who contacts you.
If the sender e-mails you again after four days, Gmail will send another vacation response, provided your vacation responder is still enabled, to remind the person that you’re away for a certain time.
Set up a vacation response following the easy steps below:
- Login to your Gmail or Google Apps account.
- Click the gear icon  in the upper right, then select Settings.
- From the General tab, select Vacation responder on in the Vacation responder: section.
- 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.
- 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. If you use Google Apps, you’ll also see an option to only send a response to people your domain. If you check both of these boxes, only people who are in your contacts and your domain will receive the automatic response.
- 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.
Your vacation response will start over each time you edit it – if someone receives your initial vacation response, and then emails you again after you’ve edited the subject or body of the message, he or she will receive the edited response, too.
PS: Messages that are classified as spam and addressed to a mailing list you subscribe to will not be sent a vacation response.
