If you're heading out on a vacation of a week or more, you should set up your email account to forward or auto-respond while you’re away. It also helps to get your email well under quota, suspend mailing lists, and make sure spam is appropriately filtered. Here’s what you need to know.

Automatic Vacation Response
Your Hampshire email can be set up to automatically reply to messages you receive while away for extended periods.

Set up auto-respond »
More info on email and vacation forwarding »

Two points that you should keep in mind when setting up your auto-response message:

• If you remove the "Subject:" line in the default message your message will have no subject line. Instead, replace the default text with the subject you want to send for your message (for example, "Subject: Out of Office May 19 - August 9").
• Wait 15 minutes before testing your message. It can take up to 15 minutes for your message to take effect.

Forwarding Mail
If you'd like to receive your Hamphire email at another email address while you're away, turn on Forwarding Status and enter the address in the box to the right.

Mailing Lists
If you subscribe to any mailing lists you may find that the messages fill up your mailbox quite quickly. Many mailing lists offer a vacation option that will allow you to suspend the receipt of mail for the time that you are away. Check with the list administrator if you are unsure of how to do this.

Spam Filtering
Finally, make sure that you're efficiently filtering out spam, which will help keep unwanted messages from filling your inbox. You may want to make sure your Spam Assassin filter is set to delete spam instead of marking it while you are away.

More info on spam filtering »