How to set an Auto-Reply for an E-Mail Address.

Owned by Marc Miller
Sept 18, 2018
3 min read

Purpose

You want to set up an Auto-reply to emails you receive if...

  • It was sent to a specific email address. (IE: You want mail sent to your alias of jdoe@<old department>.ucsb.edu to respond back to where they should contact)
  • It is being sent from a specific person. (IE: You know a certain person needs to be responded with a message...)

Solution

For this, you will want to make use of Canned Responses within GMail.

Enabling Canned Responses

  • You can enable Canned Responses by connecting to your UCSB Connect Account (https://connect.ucsb.edu) and within GMail, go to the Gear Icon () in the upper right hand corner.
  • Click on Settings to bring up your GMail settings and then click on Advanced
  • Make sure under Canned Responses (Templates) is checked as Enable.
  • Click on Save Changes if changes are made.

Setting up a Canned Response Message

Once Canned Responses is enabled, you will need to compose an email that would be used as the response.

To do this, do the following:

  • Click on Compose to create a new email
  • In the Body, type the message you wish to have sent out based on this.
  • In the lower right hand corner of the email, click on the ⋮ and select Canned Responses and then New Canned Response...
  • In the new window, give the name of the Canned Response message and click on Ok.

Set up Auto-Reply

Once the Canned Response is created, we will need to set up a filter to do the auto-reply.

To do this, click on the pulldown on the Search mail section ().

This will give you a window similar to this:

Under the To, put in the email address you want the auto-reply to answer for (such as your old email address)

OR under the From if you want the canned response to reply to a certain email you are receiving from.

Then click on Create filter.

You will see the following window:

From here you can check off how the message should be handled, we recommend checking the following:

  • Skip the Inbox (Archive it) - As you don't need to see it in your inbox
  • Mark as read - This is so you don't have to be bothered see what the email is about
  • Delete it - If you don't want to keep a copy of the email at all.
  • Send canned response - To send the auto-reply you wanted.  Be sure to select your canned response.  If it is not there, click on your browser's reload page to get it updated.

Once you have done this, click on Create filter button to finalize it.

Removing the Auto-reply

If you wish to remove the Auto-reply, click on the Gear Icon () in the upper right hand corner.

  • Go to Settings.
  • Click on Filters and Blocked Addresses.
  • Scroll down and find the Matches: portion that fits the auto-reply criteria
  • Click on delete next to it.


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