If you are planning to be away from email over the holidays, consider creating an automatic e-mail reply. An auto reply is a short message that notifies those who send you e-mail that you are not available to reply.

To create an auto reply in your Temple G-mail account, first click “settings” along the top of your e-mail page. From the “general” tab, select “vacation responder on” in the “Vacation responder” section.

Then, enter the subject and body of your message in the appropriate text fields. If you’ve already enabled a personalized signature in your settings, it will automatically be appended to the bottom of your response. If you only want people you know to receive the automatic response, check the box next to “only send a response to people in my contacts.”
Finally, click “Save Changes” to create your vacation response. If you see a banner that displays the subject of your vacation response across the top of your e-mail page, you have successfully created the automatic e-mail reply. To stop the automatic response, click “end now” within the banner.