Automatic Out-of-Office Notification

If you cannot answer or check your e-mails during a certain period of time, you can send an automatic out-of-office notification to the sender of  incoming e-mails.

However, you should think about not sending this notification to all senders of incoming e-mails:

• You might not want to send an automatic response e-mail to persons who send you a lot of e-mails on a regular basis. It will be enough to to send a notification every once in a while. The preset time in the mail portal is seven days.
  
  
• If you receive e-mails through a mailing list, not all members of that list should get a notification. Since you only have the name of the mailing list in your to- or cc- address field and not your own, you can solve the problem by adding all your e-mail accounts and aliases to the list of out-of-office notification recipients.
  
  
• User of the mail portal will find their e-mail address and the alias automatically in the address field.

Please remember to delete the out-of-office notification again as soon as you get back to office.

Log in to the mail portal with the account for which the forwarding is to be set up and click on the "Vacation Settings" tab at the top:

Login mail portal

In the text box, enter the automatic reply text that appears when you are absent. The first time you use the Out of Office Notification, Save Changes activates it and the Auto Reply text is applied.

If you have already set up an out-of-office notification, the green "ENABLED" or red "DISABLED" indicates whether the notification is currently active or not. If you want to change the automatic reply text, change the text field and confirm this with Save changes, but you have to reactivate absence notification separately with "Activate". Deactivate" deactivates the absence notification.

Out-of-office notifications for mailing lists

As mentioned above, e-mails that are received via a mailing list cannot be answered automatically by default.

Nevertheless, this can be useful. For example if several employees of an office use a mailing list "administration" and the office is closed for a few days, you can set an out-of-office notification for that list.

Out-of-office notifications for mailing lists can be set with the administrative program for mailing lists: mailman.
In this case, the administrator of the list opens:

https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/admin/Listenname

Insert the name of the list and select "Automatischer Beantworter" (automatic answering). Then, activate the first option "Soll Mailman eine automatische Antwort an Personen schicken, die eine E-Mail an die Liste schicken ?" (Do you want mailman to send an automatic reply to persons who sent an e-mail to this list?)