Out of office? Even out of town on the vacation? Make sure you set up an auto reply email so as not to make your clients or collaborators nervous with your long silence.
Google mail allows you to set up a cool vacation auto-responder that does the job extremely well. You can set up these automatic emails to be sent only to people in your Gmail address book and not to overload your mailbox with replies to newsletters and spam that was accidentally missed by the spam-filters.
Set up a vacation auto-reply in Gmail
- Click the gear icon in the right-top corner and choose Settings in Gmail:
- At the General tab switch on the vacation autoresponder:
- Write an appropriate text and the subject for the autoresponder. It would be considered a good tone if you mention the exact date when you will be back. Leave an alternative way to contact you.
- Set up the start and the end date.
- Check the “Only send a response to people in my Contacts” for the emails to be sent only to people in your contact list.
- Save the changes.
Your vacation responder begins at 12:00 AM on the start date and ends at 11:59 PM on the end date, if you do not end it earlier manually.
To turn it off just switch back to the Off option.
Backup Gmail to enhance its security
If you leave the office for a long period of time and your colleagues still have access to your computer, they may enter your Gmail account and accidentally delete some emails. And you won’t even be aware about that!
To make your mailbox more secure you can set up automated Gmail backup to have a reserve copy of your emails in another cloud.