fritz_bolivar said:
I am going on vacation. Instead of having to return to overwhelming server
downloading of all incoming emails, can I do some thing to automatically
reply that I am away from the office?
You can always setup an auto-responder by using the Exchange feature, or a
auto-responder feature provided by your e-mail provider (use the webmail
client to your account to configure its settings), or by using a client-side
rule to auto-reply to all incoming e-mails (but you would need to leave your
computer powered on all the time with Outlook running so it could run its
rule), or define a server-side rule up in your mail account if the rules
there were robust enough to let your define an auto-reply setup. You never
mentioned what type of e-mail server you use or who operates it so no one
but you knows what capabilities are available to you.
Sending a sender an auto-reply will not prevent them from sending you
e-mails. If they don't read your auto-reply, it doesn't reach them, it gets
moved into their Junk/Spam folder or deleted upon delivery, or they simply
ignore it or forget it means they will still be sending you more e-mails.
Plus they won't get your auto-reply until they have already sent you an
e-mail so, at a minimum, you will still get one e-mail from each sender
assuming they remember your auto-reply that they got from you. Of course,
any newsletters or other e-mails to which you subscribe won't care nor can
understand any auto-reply you send to them.
If you don't want all the e-mails downloaded from your account into your
local e-mail client upon your return, you could use the webmail interface to
your account to delete the obvious ones that you don't want, wade through
some of the iffy e-mails and delete those that you don't want, and just
leave the e-mails that look okay and then download them into your local
e-mail client. Of course, you could do that same cleanup after downloading
them into your local e-mail client. If you don't want to use the webmail
client to do the cleanup before downloading the good e-mails to your local
e-mail client, and you want to do all that cleanup in your local e-mail
client, you could configure your local e-mail client to download only the
headers. Then you would only consume the bandwidth to get the headers for
all those thousands of e-mails you expect to be waiting for your return.
Then delete the messages that you don't want based on the headers (i.e., who
was the sender) and manually mark the others for download and then manually
download the marked messages. Afterward, reconfigure your e-mail client to
download headers and body to get all of every e-mail delivered to you.
