Sending Email Vacation Auto-Replies

Email vacation replies are like answering machines for your email. When you're going to be away from your email for an extended period of time, you can use them to automatically reply to your incoming email to tell your correspondents that you're away, when you'll be back, and perhaps let them know who they can get in touch with for help while you're gone.

There are other things to consider. You don't want to send automatic replies to email discussion lists. I think we've all received spurious email messages from list subscribers when we've sent messages to lists. You want it to send replies only to individuals, and only to each individual once. So the software that sends the automated reply has to be smart. The ACCC's Vacation Auto-Reply system is set up to to do all that.

• Vacation Auto-Reply Filter
• Automatic Deleting Spam -- Mailserv Only
• Do You Have Other ACCC Filters?
• -- Anti-Spam Filters
• -- Shuffle or Disable Filters
• Afraid you might go over quota?

1. To set up your vacation reply, visit our Email Filter utility at https://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap-auth/bin/mail_filters.
2. You'll be asked to do a Bluestem login with your UIC netid and ACCC password.
3. If necessary, select the server your email account is on.
4. After you login, click on Vacation Auto-Reply setup.
5. The first box tells you the current status of your Auto-Reply filter. (Which at this point will most likely be NOT ACTIVE.)
   
   
6. The next section of the page has your Auto-Reply message. If you've used the service before, the one you used last will be there for you to use again or modify. If you've never used it before, you'll have to type a new one in.
   In either case, type in what you want to use and click the Save Your Vacation Message button. You can edit the message as many times as you want until you have it worded as you wish.
   
   After you save your message, you should get a message at the top of the window saying:
   RESULTS: Your message was successfully updated.
7. The next section doesn't have anything to do with vacation replies, but it might save you from running out of inbox space while you're away. One of the ACCC's automatic filters allows you to automatically delete attachments -- just attachments, not the messages they came with -- over a size specified by you. This next section allows you to turn this on of you want to. Click the box beside Automatically remove attachments over 500 K-Bytes, and change the "500" to a different size too, if you wish.
8. The final section allows you to set a date for automatic deactivation. I recommend you do this -- you'll be very busy when you get back and it's very easy to forget to turn vacation replies off in the shuffle.
   
   
9. Then click the Activate Vacation Auto-Reply Filter button. You should again receive a RESULTS: line at the top of the page; this time: RESULTS: Your Vacation Auto-Reply filter was successfully created.

If your email account is on mailserv only, and if you are using the ACCC anti-spam filter, and you've been using them long enough to know that they catch only real spam, you might want to click on the ANTI-SPAM email filter setup link at the top of the Email Filters Utility Page:

And turn on the one of the Spam Management Options that automatically deletes spam messages after a few days. Even if a real message was accidentally deleted, you will have a record, because the Spam Management Options send you email messages summarizing the spam messages you receive.

If you have the ACCC anti-spam filter turned on, and if the vacation auto-reply filter is after the anti-spam filter (which it is by default), then the vacation filter won't send a vacation reply to any message that's identified as spam.

This is a more useful feature on mailserv than it is on icarus and tigger, because the anti-spam filtering is much better on mailserv than it is on the other two servers, yet another reason for you to consider moving your email account to mailserv. (Mailserv also has a significantly higher quota than either icarus or tigger.)

The ability to shuffle the filters by any amount you want and to disable filters (without having to delete them) has recently been added to the ACCC email filter utility. If you want to modify your filters while you're away, these functions can help.

For example, I delete the messages that come in while I'm wayfrom a few of my email discussion lists. Before, I'd have to add the filters every time I left and delete them every time I came back. Now I can add them once, and disable them when I get back. The next time I leave, all I'll have to do is turn it back on. Filters like this one can help you keep you from going over quota while you're away.

We can keep email quota problems at bay while while you're gone (and for a few days beyond). Send the dates you'll be gone to systems@uic.edu. We ask, however, that you suspend your subscriptions to active Listserv email discussion lists before you leave (or delete them as above). (You probably will not want to read all the old mail in an active Listserv list when you come back anyway.) That's easy to do for UIC Listserv lists; use the UIC Listserv Subscriber Utility Web page.