Setting up an "Out of office" auto-reply

If you are going away from your email for a while, you can change the way we deal with your incoming messages.

1. Go to the webmail system at https://sqmail.gn.apc.org (or click on the ‘webmail‘ link at the top right of the page just under the search box)
2. Log in with your usual username (often the bit before the ‘@‘ sign) and password
3. Check that the webmail system has your correct email address: Go to ‘Options‘, then ‘Personal Information‘, and check that ‘E-mail address‘ is set to your usual email address.
4. Click on ‘Auto reply & Forward‘ at the top of the webmail screen
5. Edit the options and click ‘Finish‘

The basic choices are:

• ‘Keep a copy here‘ only — this is your normal setting
• ‘Keep a copy here‘ and ‘Forward?‘ both ticked – this will send a copy to another email address, e.g. of a co-worker
• ‘Keep a copy here‘ and ‘Reply?‘ both ticked – this will send an auto-reply (but see ‘Aliases’ below)

Setting up an auto-reply

You can set up a standard response, sometimes called a ‘vacation message’ or ‘auto-reply’, to all your correspondents: this will usually just say how long you are away for. Although this is a very common practice, it does have some disadvantages, including that some people regard such auto-replies as spam. You may want to consider automatically forwarding your email to someone else who can deal with it instead.

‘Aliases’

If you want an auto-reply, and have an email address at a domain other than '@gn.apc.org', for example 'myname@myorg.org' to which your contacts send email, you must add this in the ‘Aliases‘ box for the auto-reply to work for that address. This is to prevent auto-replies being sent to mailing lists. (What you put in this box is only checked to see if it is a valid email address, not for spelling errors.)

To prevent ‘mail loops’ and other annoyances, the auto-reply will only send a maximum of one reply to each person per week, and also avoids responding to forged email addresses in spam.

Setting up email forwarding

You can forward to two or three email addresses if necessary – just separate them with spaces. Tick ‘Keep a copy here‘ and ‘Forward?‘

Cancelling auto-reply or forwarding

Just log in as above and ensure that only ‘Keep a copy here‘ is ticked.