Yesterday I set up a vacation responder as part of my e-mail vendetta. If you’re thinking of doing the same, you might note a couple of tweaks:
  1. I forward multiple e-mail addresses to a single Gmail account. But Gmail’s vacation responder doesn’t do a good job of sending auto-responses to emails that come in via an intermediary account. So I’ve set up my vacation responder on both of the accounts that forward to Gmail; instead of forwarding and then auto-responding, it auto-responds and then forwards. The only drawback is that someone one e-mails me at both addresses could get my vacation message once from each account.
  2. I am part of several Basecamp accounts for group projects, and I shudder to think what will happen to those project management sites if my auto-responder gets triggered every time I get a message via Basecamp. So I changed my Basecamp account profiles to use my non-public Gmail address — the one my other accounts forward to, and which doesn’t have a vacation responder.