Setting Vacation Messages
Please Note: the unix program "vacation" is no longer supported.
Do you really need a vacation message? One drawback of using a vacation message is that even your Spam messages get sent an autoreply. This increases your Spam, since now they know they have emailed an active account.
Instructions for adding a vacation message
In order to set up vacation messages:
Login to ECE's webmail.
Click on the Filters link at the top of the page (as shown in red in the image below).
Click on the button for Add a New Rule (as shown in red in the image below)
In the Condition section of the Server-Side Mail Filtering - Create New Mail Filtering Rule page, select All from the first drop-down list at the first bullet (shown in red in the image below)
Then in the Action section of the same page, select Vacation, fill in the section for Addresses: Only reply if sent to these addresses. For instance, you will want to include your firstname.lastname email alias (for example, rachel.ponder), in addition to your regular email (for example, rachel) Then fill in the message that you would like people to receive. (as shown in red in the image below)
The vacation program sends out your message, to each person that emails you, the first time that they email you. It will not send your message again to that person until the number of days that you specify (in the Days: Reply message will be resent after [blank] days section) have passed, and then only if they send you another email. Once you turn the vacation message off it does not send any more messages. If you set it to 30, then each person that emails you in those thirty days will just get one vacation message from you. If you turn it off before the 30 days are up they won't get any more vacation messages from you.
At the bottom of that page, click the button for Add New Rule button (as shown in red in the image below).
You should then see a verification: "Successfully added new rule." Verify that the left side of the Description of Rule has "ALL" and the right side has "Vacation Message ".
Instructions for removing a vacation message
In order to remove your vacation message:
Login to ECE's webmail.
Click on the Filters link at the top of the page (as shown in red in the image below).
Then either
- Click on the icon of the trash can next to the rule you created, (as shown in red in the image below)
- OR, select the box next to the rule you created, and click on the
Delete button. (as shown in red in the image below)
Last revised on June 19, 2006.