A vacation message is an automatic reply to any email you receive. It is particularly useful if you are going on leave and need to inform senders that you may not be able to reply for some time, or to contact another person until you get back.

First you should enable the vacation message by ticking the box next to "Enable Automatic vacation reply."

The next step is to enter a start and finish date for your vacation message. Enter the start date next to "Start Vacation notice on:" and the finish date next to "Stop Vacation notice on:". Make sure they are in the format mm/dd/yyyy. Note that the month and day are not in the usual order. See the picture above for an example.

Because these messages can get annoying to someone who needs to send you a lot of mail, you can tell webmail to remember who has already received this message from you and wait a number of days before they can receive this message again. Do this by entering a number next to the heading "Number of days between replies to repeat senders". Remember this setting when you test your vacation message later.

Note that there can be an approximately 15 minute delay between changing settings(including enabling and disabling the message) so be sure to wait 15 minutes before testing.

You should specify a subject line for your vacation message under the "Subject:" heading.

Next you need to enter the content of the vacation message. You can optionally add additional text to internal senders(other uts staff and students) that relates to UTS only. Place this text under the heading "The following text will be included in your vacation message to internal senders:".

Finally enter the text that you wish to appear in all vacation messages under "The following text will be included in your vacation message".

Click save changes when you have everything the way you want it.

It's a good idea to test your vacation message when you are done. You can do this by sending yourself an email. Remember to wait at least 15 minutes before doing so and that it will only work once if you have "Number of days between replies to repeat senders" set to a value of greater than 0.