E-mail filters for Vacation Message

A Vacation message can be set in Webmail to let senders know if you will not be answering e-mail from your Bates account.

Please also consult creating and managing message forwarding and creating and managing message filters

Help Desk Services has done BLive interactive instruction sessions on creating a vacation message. This power point presentation also covers the steps listed in this helpsheet.

These filters for forward, vacation or message filtering take effect for all your IMAP email programs (Webmail, Thunderbird IMAP, Mutt). The filters are processed before your mail is delivered to a mail reading program. You may also enter additional filters in Thunderbird to take effect after the mail is delivered to Thunderbird.

You can send an auotmatic response to any messages that are sent to you. Your incoming messages will be saved in your Inbox. An automatic response will be sent to the Sender. Login to Webmail:

• Click on Options
• Click on Filters
• Click on Vacation in the top menu bar
• Enter your full email address in the box labeled my email addresses

Fill in the boxes:

• Enter the full email addresses of people or mailing lists who should not get a reply
• Check the box for Do not send responses to bulk or list messages. Mailing list members do not appreciate these vacation messages. Returning a message to a phishing message in bulk mail may validate your email address to the original sender and bring you more SPAM
• Click the box before: Number of days between vacation replies. Webmail is keeping track of the addresses that get a vacation response. This is the number of days to wait before sending an autoresponse to an address that has already received one. 7 days means that webmail will send the vacation response no more than once a week
• Enter the subject for your autoresponse vacation message
• Enter the autoresponse message you wish to be sent in the Reason box.. Including an alternate address for the person to contact is often a good idea

• Click Save
• Click on Return to Rules List box
• Click on the red to enable the vacation autoresponse

 

To stop the autoresponse vacation message from being sent:

• Click on Filter Rules on the top menu bar
• Click the green arrow beside vacation to disable the vacation message

NOTE: The Filter Rules are executed in the order displayed here. Be sure to run through the filters in order to be sure messages are going where you expect. For example: if the puremessage filter that moves PMX messages to the junk folder is processed before the forward message, these messages will not get forwarded to your new address.

WARNING: DO NOT test the vacation program from your email address as it will cause an infinite loop of message,answer,message,answer.