Put Automatic Reply in Gmail when you go on vacation

 

How does Gmail's autoresponder work?

There are many companies that use, for example, GSuite for their email needs , so that naturally, Google has a functionality in Gmail that allows us to enable an automatic response for all those occasions in which we will not be able to respond. or even read our emails.

As it is practically the same Gmail that free Google users can use, this functionality is available to everyone at no additional cost, so in this guide we are going to show you how to configure and activate the automatic response in Gmail when we go on vacation.

The automatic reply is a way of letting everyone who writes to our email know that we are not in a position to constantly monitor our email inbox,  whether due to being on vacation or being on a business trip, between other things.

This is something that we constantly use right here at Geeknetic, because as many of you will know, we constantly attend the main events around the world, such as Computex in Taiwan , or IFA in Berlin , situations in which we run into a load more than usual work and very little availability to respond or even read emails , which is why the autoresponder exists in the first place.

Likewise, its operation is not excessively complicated, as we will see below, and that is, although we have some margin for configuration, the basic concept that it is Gmail itself who responds to incoming messages automatically with a text predefined by us , with the ability to even do it with rich text, it is very easy to understand and activate.

Activate automatic reply in Gmail from a computer

• To activate the automatic response in Gmail from a computer, we will have to open Gmail in our preferred browser , in the case that we are dealing with Google Chrome, something that will take us directly to our mailbox, and from here we can access the configuration menu that interests us, regardless of the design that our email tray has.

• Clicking on the gear icon will open the quick setting panel. From here we can change the design of our mailbox, but we are interested in accessing the section where all the settings are found , which is naturally behind the "See all settings" button.

• Once we click on this button, we will find ourselves in the general configuration tab, and we will only have to scroll down to the end of the list of options that are made available to us to activate the automatic response in our Gmail account.

• In this section we find the option to activate or deactivate the automatic response, as well as the settings to change when we want to configure the text and the period during which our automatic message will work , with a start date and an end date.

• As we see in the image, the automatic response will be deactivated automatically on the date we indicate , although it is not mandatory to add a date if we do not know it or want to disable it manually, even being aware of the return date of our absence .

• Likewise, as an optional box, we also find the option to send an automatic response to our contacts, something that we will have to assess depending on the traffic that we generally have in our email account. Be that as it may, once we have finished, we will have to save the changes, something that will return us to the Gmail inbox, and we will reconfirm the changes saved in the upper notification bar.

• As we see in the image, when we receive a message, Gmail will automatically send another one back in the form of an automatic response that we can check in our mailbox, so that we can instantly check the correct operation of our automatic response, and we can layout it again if we are not convinced or we have forgotten some detail.

Obviously, to disable the automatic response, we will follow the same steps to get to the same section and we will only select the option to disable the automatic response, something that will return the usual behavior to our account. In the same way, as we have mentioned, we can program an automatic deactivation date, which will be effective at 23:59 on the end date.

Activate automatic reply in Gmail from a smartphone or tablet

To do the same on a smartphone or tablet, we will need to have the Gmail application. In Android devices we will have it since we acquired the terminal, as long as it has Google services, something that may not be the case if our ROM has been replaced by one without Google components or, on the contrary, we have acquired a terminal without them, as could perfectly be the case of the Huawei P40 Pro. As for Apple devices, we will have to go to the App Store and download Gmail to proceed with the rest of the steps that we are going to expose here.

• Once we have the application, we are going to open it and touch on the upper left drop-down menu, which we can locate by the icon with three horizontal lines. This menu is known as a “hamburger menu” in the Google ecosystem because of its similarity to a hamburger - there are several Android design elements that have food names - but we will call it a dropdown menu.

• When we have opened it, we will go down to the end of the menu and touch on settings , something that will take us to a selection screen that will normally look quite empty if we only have one email account, but that has support to manage several email accounts and their respective settings , so that we will touch the account in which we want to activate the automatic response to enter its settings.

• Once here, we will go down almost to the end of the account settings menu to reach the Automatic Answer option , where we can enter and see the equivalent settings to the desktop site, and the configuration that is already saved in our account if previously we have made someone change in it, as we can see in the image where the remains of the tests carried out in the previous step are left , which would simply be to write the subject and the body of the response message, configure the dates we will need the automatic reply, and define to whom we want these automatic replies to be sent.

• In the same way, to manually disable the automatic reply in Gmail, we will only have to perform the same steps to get to the automatic reply menu and disable it, so that it really is a simple procedure that we can do and undo at will without too much trouble.

Other Gmail Auto Reply Considerations

The possibility of enabling the automatic response or changing its configuration from any device will even allow us to enable it if we are out of the office and we have forgotten to configure it from the computer , something that many users will surely appreciate, because as we mentioned at the beginning of the guide , it is something that we can potentially activate from an airplane to an event in another country if the circumstances require it.

Something that if we lose when configuring the automatic response from a mobile device with the Gmail application is that we will not be able to use rich text , something that we can do from the desktop web page, although we can also choose to activate the automatic response from our mobile device so that every user who writes us knows that we are not available, and later modify the message to use rich text.

The possibilities that the automatic response from the desktop offers us, therefore, are greater, since we can embed different fonts, format, links, text colors and even images , especially useful so that the message is much more differentiable than what we would normally write , ensuring that the recipient understands that we are not in our office.

Likewise, it should be noted that, be that as it may, each email account will only receive an automatic response every four days, that is, if we receive two emails in a row from the same user, Gmail will only send an automatic response if between the two emails has passed a minimum of four days. In this way, we avoid that both our sent messages tray and the other person's received messages tray end up saturated with emails sent automatically.

Anyway, if after this period, we receive an email from the same account again, said user will receive the automatic response again. Similarly, if it is an automatic email from a subscription or simply an email that has gone to our Spam folder, Gmail will never send the automatic message , as it is understood that these are unsupervised email accounts that are not they will not benefit in any way from the autoresponders as a real person would behind an email account.