#ACCESSING APPLE MAIL PREFERENCES HOW TO#
#ACCESSING APPLE MAIL PREFERENCES MAC#

Unlike Apple Mail in macOS, ‌iCloud‌ Mail has a dedicated out-of-office feature called Vacation mode that you can enable remotely from any web browser.įor obvious reasons, Vacation mode will only be useful to you if you have an ‌iCloud‌ email address.

#ACCESSING APPLE MAIL PREFERENCES HOW TO#

How to Set Up Out-of-Office replies in iCloud Mail It's worth noting that you can tweak the rule's conditions to suit your needs – so that the out-of-office reply is only sent out to specific people, or only in response to emails with certain subjects, for example. The next time you're away, simply check the box again to reactivate it.Īnd that's it.

To make the out-of-office reply inactive upon your return, simply uncheck the box next to the said rule.

#ACCESSING APPLE MAIL PREFERENCES MAC#

Leave things as they are and keep your Mac on, and all incoming messages to that account will be responded to automatically. Your out-of-office reply rule is now active.In other words, click Do Not Apply, for the simple reason that clicking the alternative 'Apply' option will cause Mail to send the automatic reply to all the messages currently sitting in your inbox, and you don't want that!

Be very sure to respond to this question with a negative.

WARNING! At this point, Apple Mail will ask if you want to apply the new rule to existing messages in your mailbox.

Click OK to close the Rules dialog box.

Click OK to close the input window when you're done.

In the input window that appears, type the text you want to appear in the automatic response email that will be sent when you're away.

In the second condition under 'Perform the following actions:', select Reply to Message from the dropdown menu.

For the initial condition, select Account from the first dropdown menu, and then choose the email account that you want your out-of-office rule to apply to from the condition's second dropdown menu.

Leave the default 'any' selection in 'If any of the following conditions are met'.

In the Rules dialog box that appears, click the Add Rule button and give the rule an identifiable description, such as 'Out of Office Reply'.

From the menu bar, select Mail -> Preferences.

How to Create an Out-of-Office Reply Using Mail Rules If you're looking for a longer term out-of-office solution, you'll want to check out Vacation mode in iCloud Mail, which we cover in the second part of this tutorial. That's because Apple Mail rules are only applied locally to incoming emails, and aren't active on the server side. It's worth bearing in mind at the outset that your Mac needs to be powered on for this out-of-office method to work. Apple's native Mail application in macOS lacks a specific option for enabling out-of-office replies, but there is another way you can set them up on a Mac, and that's with Rules.

Accessing apple mail preferences