How often do you check your email? Do you love checking email? Is answering email your primary mission in life? Do you ever wish you could just get away from email for a little while?

Well, you can, by using an email vacation responder. Even if you don’t consider your holiday plans to be “vacation,” maybe it’s worth designating a couple of email-free days sometime in the next couple of weeks.

How it Works

When you have the vacation responder turned on, when someone emails you, they receive an immediate reply email with a message saying something like “I’m away from the office until January 5. I will respond to your message after that date.” Their email to you is delivered to your inbox as usual. You can read your email while the responder is on — and if you want to go back on your word, you could even respond to some of it (although that would be defeating the point of saying you’re away).

The value of using the responder is that it assures the sender that you did receive their message and signals that your response will be delayed by some period of time.

Setting Up a Responder

Most university email systems provide out of office responder options, and so does Gmail. Although the specific steps on your system may vary slightly, typically you set the dates you want the responder to start and end, enter the text to use as the response, and (in Gmail at least) choose whether the response is sent only to people in your contact list or to any senders. Most systems minimize repetition — if the same sender emails you again within a four-day window, they won’t receive the automatic reply. Gmail and many other systems are also good at detecting when you receive a message from a listserv or other mailing list, and do not answer with the responder.

Dos and Don’ts for Writing Your Automatic Response

• Do provide a time frame or endpoint: “I’ll be away from email until January 5″ or “During Spring semester, I will be doing fieldwork and will be replying to email only once a week.”

• Don’t provide a starting date — if the sender is receiving the message on January 3rd that you’ll be back on the 5th, they don’t need to know when you started your vacation.

• If (and only if) it’s relevant and expected given your role, you can provide an emergency contact: “If you need immediate assistance, contact the library services desk at X.”

• Don’t overshare — simply stating that you’ll be away or delayed in your response is enough — you don’t have to tell us that you’ll be hiking in the mountains, or chasing three toddlers through an aiport.

Personally Speaking

Even though I usually don’t feel stressed about email, when I used an email responder for the first time earlier this year, I was surprised at how good it felt to be able to just ignore email for a few days. Whether you’re on vacation, on a writing retreat, or just planning to spend a couple days zoning out watching movies, you can clearly define that time as your own by using an automatic email responder.

[Creative Commons licensed image from Flickr user Glenn]

Do you use an email responder? Let us know in the comments!