Many situations can take you out of the office as an individual, and such situations can last for days; one common example is vacations. Then it becomes difficult to keep track of the number of emails you receive from people during this time period. Imagine automatically responding to these emails while you are away from the office with a single customized message because you shouldn't be bothered with responding to your emails while you are away from the office.
In this article, we will learn how to easily set up an out-of-office mail response in Gmail without the use of any external tools.
Now let's get started!
What is an Out-of-Office Responder?
An out-of-office message is the response that you have carefully designed to send to those who attempt to contact you while you are out of the office. Because you are unavailable to respond to them, this is handled automatically. This will let anyone who emails you know that you are not available at the moment, rather than expecting a response and causing issues - instead your auto-responder can direct them to a colleague that can provide assistance, for example.
Why should you make use of an Out-of-Office Responder?
There are numerous reasons why you should set up an out-of-office auto responder when you will not be in the office, but the following are the most important:
- It makes you less concerned about not being able to respond to emails.
- Anyone who sends an email receives an automatic response.
- There is no need for an external tool, and it is completely free to set up and use.
Setting up an Out-of-Office Responder in Gmail?
The first step is to ensure that you have an active Gmail/Google account on your device, as this is required before you can start setting up an out-of-office responder. If you don't already have one, you can create an account.
Once you have created an account, or logged into Gmail, we can get started. Here are few steps to guide you setup an out-of-office responder in Gmail. Start by clicking the settings icon, as shown in the image below:
The next step would be to click on the "See all settings" button.
Once that is done, you will be directed to another page just like it is shown here:
Ensure you scroll down to the last section of this page, which would look something like this:
Note: This is the vacation responder section, where you will create an out-of-office responder.
At this point, we can begin filling out the form, which will collect all the necessary information from us, such as the start and end date, message, subject of the email, and so on. Let's go over these questions again, so you understand what they mean:
The first thing we have to do is click the radio button in front of "Vacation responder on" to turn on the Vacation responder as seen in the image below:
The next section is where we would set both the first and last day of let's say our vacation or out-of-office message. This is just to determine when an out-of-office message is to be activated and when it is to be deactivated.
If you're familiar with how emails are sent, you'll know that the subject can be referred to as the title of our email, and it should contain clear and concise information to entice users to read it. In other words, it tells the reader what the message is about. Fill out the Subject field completely.
Once that is done, ensure to fill up the message field with the response which you would like to be sent to anyone who sends you a mail.
Note: Click the box next to Only send a response to people in my Contacts if you only want your contacts to receive your vacation response.
After you have finished filling the form. Click on the "Save Change" button. And that is all. Congratulations, you have successfully created an out-of-office responder!
How to Set up Gmail Out-of-Office Responder on Mobile
As we mentioned earlier for that of web, we also have to ensure we log in to our Gmail account, once that is done, we can now access our Gmail Application to set up an out-of-office responder.
The first step would be to click the menu icon at the top-left side of the page, as shown in the image below.
Then we can scroll down, so we can click on the "Settings" tab.
Once that is completed, we will be directed to the page below, which contains a list of all of your logged-in Gmail accounts. Click on the Gmail account you want to use to proceed to the next step.
Once we have done that, we will be directed to this page below where we will scroll down to the "Vacation responder" option. Click on "Vacation responder".
Once you have clicked on the Vacation responder option, you will be directed to the page shown below. The first thing will be for us to switch the button on the right side of the "vacation responder" option to turn it on. Now, we can fill in the form, as we did for the desktop version.
Once you have finished filling in the form. Click on the "Done" button at the top right side of the page to submit.
To terminate an out-of-office responder. Click on the switch button on the right side of the "vacation responder" option to turn off the vacation responder (just opposite of how we turned it on earlier).
Conclusion
In this article, we learned how to easily set up an out-of-office responder in Gmail by making use of the feature in Gmail's settings page, as well as how to turn it off, for both desktop and mobile versions of Gmail. We hope you found this article to be helpful!
