Hi everyone, Michael here. Today I’m going to show you how you can turn on an out of office reply in Gmail or what they call a vacation responder. Google has not made it very easy to figure out how to set that thing up, but I’d be happy to show you right now. Once you log into Gmail, you will be dropped into the main inbox area. My inbox area is empty because I’ve created a new account for the purposes of this video. What I’d like us to do is move up to the top right-hand corner to the gear icon, which is the symbol for settings. Let’s click on that. This brings up a panel on the right called quick settings. These quick settings allow you to design the look and feel of your inbox. We’re not totally interested in that right now. What we want to do is click see all settings. Here in the all settings area, there are a lot of different things we can tinker with and edit, but we’re not going to worry about that today. What we want to focus on is at the very, very bottom, this area called vacation responder. The vacation responder is by default set to off. What we’ll want to do is click on. Then we will say what our first day is of a vacation or out of office. I’m going to select today. You can also leave the last day checkbox empty. It’s optional. So, if you wanted to leave this vacation or out of office responder on indefinitely, you could do so by just keeping this unchecked. I would like to have it automatically shut off when I’m back on the plane on the way home. I will click last day. It defaults to about a week out, and I’m actually going to say no, I’m not flying back until the Friday. Here in the subject, I’ve written currently unavailable traveling. You want to keep it sweet and succinct so that people understand that you are away. Next, I will type in my message here. Hello there, I’m currently traveling to a cookie conference. I would also add in something like an emergency contact number if somebody really needs to get ahold of you. Also, back in my professional days in the office, I would often include how long it would likely take me to respond to an email. Additionally, on the ribbon up here, there are a number of settings you can italicize or bold or change colors of your fonts and background. I like to keep it simple. You could also insert images if you want to do that. Maybe you want to send a picture of where you are, something clever, something funny. You could also insert links. Perhaps you want to say, hey, here’s a list of the colleagues I work with and their emails, and you host that somewhere. You could also do that as well. By default, this area here is set to plain text. You can also change this to rich formatting. I’ve only ever had to use that when copying a message from another program like Word or Docs and dropping it in here. It defaults to plain, as I’ve mentioned. I would just leave it like that if you’re not looking to do anything fancy. At the bottom here, we see this bolded response option that says only send a response to people in my contacts. This basically means that if somebody writes you and you don’t know who they are or you have not yet interacted with them, they will not receive your vacation responder. I choose to usually leave this unchecked, but if you feel that this is important, feel free to check it. The only thing left to do to get this thing up and running is hit save changes. You could also completely abandon by hitting cancel. If you forget to hit save changes and just go back up to the top left to inbox or something else, it will prompt you, helpfully so, to ask, would you like to discard your changes? I have been saved by that numerous times, but right now I’m going to click save changes. Once you’ve done that, a yellow banner will appear at the top of your inbox. It’s very helpful, very bright. You can’t miss it. It has currently unavailable dash traveling in here. You may remember that that was the subject line of my vacation responder. Here you can manually turn that off in case you don’t want your out of office or vacation responder going out. And you can also choose to adjust the dates or any of the other settings we just took a look at. Once you have everything set up on your computer, you can double check things or edit things on your phone while you’re on the go. I am in the settings area of Gmail on a mobile device. If we scroll down to the near bottom, but not all the way to the bottom, we can see that my vacation responder is on just the way I set it up on my computer. I can click in here and make any changes I want. I can only really make edits to the send only to my contacts or anything here in the body of the text. Not a lot I can do with formatting or pictures. I can also choose to manually toggle on or off the vacation responder. If you want to save things, you have to hit done. If you do not, you hit close and that’s really all there is to it. I hope this video set you up for success when you travel and now you won’t have to worry about which emails you’re missing. If you enjoyed this tutorial, please consider liking and subscribing for more content like this and we will see you in the next video.