Vacation Mode (SquirrelMail)

SquirrelMail can activate, deactivate, and change your email account’s “vacation mode.” This allows your email account to become a sort of answering machine, keeping messages until you can retrieve them but sending back an automated message saying that you’re on vacation until a certain day. This helps for when you’re unable to check email for summer recess, winter break, maternity leave, etc.

Vacation mode is also able to forward email messages to another account. This could be helpful if you prefer to have all of your email (home and work) in one place or you are gone for a particularly long time.

• Login to SquirrelMail.
• Click on “Options” at the top of the window.
• Click on “Vacation Message”.
• Check “Send auto-reply to sender?”
• Enter a short but descriptive subject. For example, “Away until 10/23”.
• Enter the body of your message. For example, “Due to maternity leave, I will be unavailable until 10/23. Please email substitute@cairodurham.org until that time. If this is an emergency, you can call the main office at 123-4567.”
• If you want to have the messages forwarded to another address you can check “Forward incoming messages to address listed below?” and then enter the full address in the area labeled “Forwarding email addresses”. This could be useful in cases of substitute teachers, your home email address, etc. Please note that only the full address should be used here, e.g. “example@place.com” not just “example”.
• If you want to change your email account into a purely forwarding service, you can check “No local delivery; forward and/or auto-reply only.” This is not recommended unless you will be completely unavailable for many months.
• Click the “Submit” button.

• Login to SquirrelMail.
• Click on “Options” at the top of the window.
• Click on “Vacation Message”.
• Uncheck “Send auto-reply to sender?”
• If you changed your email account into a forwarding service, uncheck “No local delivery; forward and/or auto-reply only.”
• Click the “Submit” button.

Note: You can leave your subject and message as they were. This will not effect you if all the check boxes are unchecked. It could be useful if/when you need to turn it back on.