Gmail: set up filter to run when out of office

1. Click on the gear icon at the top right of your inbox. It looks like this:

   

2. Select Settings.

3. In the General tab, scroll down to "Vacation responder"
4. Select Vacation responder on
5. Fill out the dates you would like the response to be on and the subject and body for the message you would like to be sent as a reply.
   • Check the Only send a response to people in my Contacts if you don't want to send out the auto-responder to people not already in your address book.
6. Click Save Changes

Yes, it's possible. Unfortunately, unlike the vacation autoresponder which only sends the message once to the sender, you'll end up sending the message every time you receive a message.

First, you need to turn on the Canned Responses lab and set one up.

(To create a canned response, start by composing a new message, then in the context menu of the compose window choose Canned responses → New canned response….)

Once you've got your canned response, now you need a filter.

Create a filter with the trigger from:john@example.com and choose as the action Send canned response: and choose the canned response you just created. You may want to make the filter more specific and/or choose other things to do with the message. (There are lots of posts here that cover Gmail and filters. Look under the gmail-filters tag.)

Now, whenever a message matches your criteria, a response with your canned text will be sent immediately back. As I mentioned, however, this will happen with every message that trips your filter.