How To Schedule Your GMail Vacation Auto Reply Before Leaving On Vacation

How many times have you gone on vacation only to forget something. It seems to never fail that the only time you remember everything you need to take care of, is when your planning the trip a day or two before leaving.

For me I always seem to forget about setting up my out of office reply. I'll go away and get a ton of email, and it'll hit me. I forgot to set up my out of office reply.

But not anymore. Thanks to GMail, they finally introduced a feature that allows you to schedule your vacation auto reply (A.K.A. Out Of Office Reply) ahead of time before you venture off on vacation.

With out this setting enabled, your current GMail Vacation responder probably looks like this:

There's no setting to pre-schedule it ahead time.

To enable the new feature, called Vacation Time!, just log on to your GMail account and click on the Labs icon at the top right corner of the screen next to the Settings link.

In the Labs screen, scroll down to the Vacation Time! section and click on the Enable radio button.

Then click on the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen. You will then be taken to your inbox

Now, when you need to schedule your auto vacation response, click on the Settings link (next to the Labs icon shown in the first screen shot above) and scroll down to the Vacation responder section.

Then click on the Vacation responder on radio button to enable it and set up the First day: and Last day: dates you want the auto reply to start and end. Don't forget to fill in the Subject and Message fields.

Once you are finished, click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen.

Now the only thing that is left for you to do….is go on vacation! See Ya Later.