First Class Auto Reply
OK, so you are about to go on a vacation, or you are going to be out of school for a few days. You want people who are sending you emails to know that you are not ignoring them, but that you won't be reading them until you return.
FC has a feature to automatically respond with a message you create to people sending you emails... Here is how you set it up
1. Log in to First Class and go into the Preferences - On the Mac go to the Menu item that says First Class - Preferences - On the PC go to the Edit Menu- Preferences
2. Go to the Messaging Tab - select the Mail Rules tab (if it is grayed out let Woody know so he can adjust your settings)
3. In the "Automatically reply to" box type in the Reply Text box the message that you would want the sender to receive (ie. I am out of the office today, and will get to your email when I return)
4. Select who you want the message to go to - Local Mail is for all the users of FC in the school system - Internet mail is for people sending from outside our system. By selecting yes in either of these boxes, messages will automatically be sent to anyone who sends you a message with the reply text you typed.
5. Be sure to turn this off upon your return
A suggestion - Be careful when using the auto reply for internet mail - If you are on an email listserv it will announce your absense to everyone on that mailing list (just be aware of that - you can decide if that is OK or not)
On that same page you will see a couple of other features
1. The auto-forward would allow you to send emails received in your account to another email account - If you are out and don't want to access FC but would want to read the emails in another email account use this feature. You can choose to turn this on for local and internet mail (we do not do the voice/fax in FC) as well as choosing to Forward it (will leave a copy in your FC mailbox) or Redirect it (will just send it to your other email address and not keep a copy in the FC mailbox) - Be sure to put your correct email address in the forward to box (not your FC address, another email address you have)
2. Junk Mail handling - This refers to the emails that have Junk in the title - They are designated as such by the server. I would strongly suggest leaving the Accept choice on this since some of the groups we receive emails from for some reason fall under the Junk status - One of these is the DESE (go figure). If you do decide to change thsi setting be aware that yoou may not receive certain emails. -WF
How do I set up my email to bounce messages back to staff when I am away and avoid bouncing back to spammers?
You can set up a message to send automatically to just people inside First Class - Go to your Preferences (on PC Edit menu - Preferences) Go to the Messaging Tab - In the “Automatically reply to” box, put your message in reply text:
In the Local mail, select yes
In Internet mail, select no
Remind yourself to turn this feature off when you return. For obvious reasons sending yourself an email to your school email address will not work.