How To Set Up An Automatic Vacation Responder To A Gmail Account

Going on vacation? No access to the Internet? No problem! Use Gmail's Vacation Responder  to set up a smart email autoreply to let people know you won't be able to get back to them right away.

"Here's how to let people know you can't respond right away":

Sign into your Gmail account by entering your user name and password.

Click the gear icon at the top of your Gmail screen in the upper-right and select "mail settings" and the Gmail then redirects you to the “General Settings” tab

Scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see the  “Vacation Responder” section.

Select "Vacation responder on" . Don’t worry, it won’t turn on until the date you tell it to start.

Write down the “Subject” in the field. Type in what you want the title of your automatic vacation response email to be and enter the body of your "Message" in the field. Include whatever you want to divulge to those sending your email while you are away". Let them know where you are, when you may be returning and who they should contact in the case of an emergency.

"If you have enabled a personalized signature in your settings, Gmail will automatically append it to the bottom of your vacation response"

While the "Vacation Responder is enabled", you will see a banner across the top of any Gmail page, displaying the subject of your Vacation Response. A banner at the top of your Gmail account reminds you the automatic Responder is activated. It stays there until you deactivate it.  To deactivate  your Gmail from automatically sending the response, click end now within the banner. Or, if you would like to edit the response, click “vacation settings".

You can set the Gmail Vacation Responder, If you prefer that the message be sent  and to reply only to those on your contact list. That means Spammers are out of luck  by sending you unwanted emails. Avoiding to clog your mailing lists with autoreplies, you may want to remove your mailing list emails from your contacts. If you don’t like  the idea to do it, you could forward your email to a second Gmail account, but then add a specific contacts to that account, to make sure not to  include things like mailing lists or even family or friends who already know you are on vacation. 

Technically this would be a violation of the Gmail To's, but who doesn’t have more than one Gmail account?