Stopping the Cycle of Automated Vacation Reminders

I know you’ve seen them.  Those automated responses that say “Thank you for your email.  I’m on vacation until March 12th and will be in touch after that date.”  Or the ones that say “Thank you for your email.  I’m checking email two times a day.”

Okay, great.  It’s always a good thing to know if someone’s on vacation so that I don’t expect a response, or when someone is only checking emails twice a day so I’m not sitting on pins and needles waiting for an answer.

But what happens when every single time you send that person an email, you get the same automated response?   In some instances all in one day, you send an email, you get the automated response, then the person responds, you respond, you get the automated response, the person responds again, you respond, you get automated response…you get the picture!  How annoying is that to receive those multiple automated responses?!  If you’re using automated responses, there is something you can do to fix it.

If you’re using Gmail, it’s smart and knows how annoying it can be to receive multiple “I’m away” messages in a day. If you use the automated response feature, it will send the “I’m away” email once every 4 days at the most.  Very cool!

To set up your automated response:

·        Click on “Settings” at the top right of the page.

·        Under the “General” tab scroll all the way down to almost the bottom where you see “Vacation responder”.

·        Click “On”.

·        If you’re only going on vacation, you can set the start and end date.  If this is an “I only check emails twice a day” type message, leave the end date blank.

·        Fill out your subject line and the message you want to send.

·        Click on “Save changes”.

If you’re not using Gmail, you can check with your email provider through the webmail and see if there is an option to only send the automated response once every X number of days.  If there’s not that option, here’s what you can do:

·        If you don’t already have a Gmail account, set one up.
·        After you set up your account (or using your existing Gmail account), set your emails to CC to your Gmail address.
·        Then sign into your Gmail account and follow the steps above to set up your automated response.

That’s it!  If you’re having problems setting up your email automated response, send me an email and I’ll see if I can help walk you through it.