While you're away enjoying a time-out from high technology and small devices, Zoho Mail is still at home, connected and, naturally, listening for incoming mail. It could let the kind senders know up to which you are — and when you'll be back returning emails, of course.
Well, Zoho Mail can. Try not to make those senders too jealous, will you?
Set Up a Vacation Out-of-Office Auto-Reply in Zoho Mail
To have Zoho Mail reply to incoming emails automatically in your absence:
- Follow the Settings link in Zoho Mail.
- Go to the Mail tab.
- Open the Vacation Reply category under Personalize.
- Click Add Vacation Reply.
- Pick the desired email account under Choose account.
- To set up one autoresponder for all your accounts, make sure Apply for All Accounts is checked.
- Typically, make sure Everyone is selected under Enable vacation reply for.
- Choose My contacts to avoid sending out-of-office replies to senders not in your Zoho Mail address book; choose My non-contacts to send only to senders not in your contacts — if all the people you know already know about your vacation, for instance.
- Pick the desired start and end date for your auto-reply.
- You can enter an end day beyond the time when you will return and manually disable the auto-responder when you do, of course.
- Enter the subject line of your vacation reply under Subject.
- Zoho Mail will not include the sender's subject line ("Re: Subject") in its automatic reply.
- Pick the interval (in days) for auto-replies to a single sender under Autoresponse Interval.
- If you enter "3", for example, and you get three emails from one sender on one day and five more on the next day, Zoho Mail will send just one auto-reply; if another email from the same sender comes on the third day, they will get another vacation response.
- Type the body text you want to appear in your out-of-office auto-response.
- Include approximate info on when you will be able to reply personally, if possible. An alternative contact or an alternative way of contacting you might also be appropriate.
- You can also ask people to re-send their message — if it's still relevant — when you will have returned.
- Note that Zoho Mail will not quote the original message in its auto-reply.
- Click Save.
Any automatic replies sent by Zoho Mail will not appear in your account's Sent folder.
(Updated September 2011)
