CSE staff and students are encouraged to use UNSW's mail service.
People with UNSW mail accounts can set up automatic responses to mail they receive, such as when they are on holidays.
Outlook Web Access Method
You can set your UNSW email Out of Office Reply at a webpage.
This method should work for recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.
This even works on iOS Safari (iPhones/iPads).
Use this method unless you are confident you can set an Out of Office Reply in your mail client application.
In the top right corner click on Options and select Set Automatic Replies...
You will go to the page to set your Out of Office message which OWA calls Automatic Replies
To turn on the service click on Send automatic replies.
After this (as you can see) there are a few options.
If you want you can set a start and end date for the message to go out.
You can also set a different message for people inside and outside your organization.
In this case the organization is UNSW.
It's recommended that you leave these settings at their defaults.
The easiest thing to do is just copy and paste the message from one box to the other.
Once you have everything set to your liking click on the OK button in the top-left corner.
Outlook Web Access on iOS
On an iPad or iPhone you can go to Outlook Web Access in the web browser, Safari, but you will only get the "simple" interface. For general use this interface has some drawbacks, principally there appears to be no way to see your folders of saved mail, but it is fine to set your "Automatic Replies".
First, log in as above. You will see your inbox.
In the top right is a link called Options. Click on it.
This will take you to a new page and in the left column is a link, Automatic Replies. Click on this and it will take you to the same settings page above.
iOS Mail Client
The iPhone/iPad mail client can set your Out of Office Reply directly.
However, this will only activate replies to emails sent within UNSW Exchange.
Mail sent to your account from outside mail addresses (eg: CSE, Gmail, Hotmail, …) will get no reply.
Auto-responding from your mail client
Various mail client applications (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook) can process mail in your mailbox with sophisticated rules.
One way they can process mail is to automatically reply with messages like I'm on leave....
Note that these rules are only applied when your mail client application is running and connected to the mail service you use. (UNSW, CSE, Gmail, etc.)
We recommend that you instead set autoresponder rules with your mail server, as described above for UNSW and CSE servers.
This means the replies will be sent immediately and you don't need to connect to your mail for them to be sent.
To configure the Apple Mail client read this article.
CSE mail accounts
CSE has an auto-reply program you can use to answer emails if you're going to be away for a while.
Just send a mail to on@vacation, with the subject something like I'm away until dd/mm/yy and the body of the mail containing the message you want people to get.
When you come back, send an empty mail to off@vacation to disable the auto-reply.
Depending on how you send your mail, you may need to send an extra confirmation mail.
If this is the case, you will be sent an email with details after you mail on@vacation.
Just send a test mail to be sure that it has activated.
See the man page for more details.
