Forward emails and set vacation responses

2 min read

Use iCloud Mail to set up automated responses when you are away and forward emails to another account

There is huge pent-up demand for holidays and it’s likely you’ll be away from work and home sometime soon. What about emails when you are away? Do you ignore messages or spoil your holiday by dealing with them? Set up your email account to manage messages automatically by sending replies to enquiries and forwarding workrelated ones to someone else.

Forward emails to a colleague who can take care of them in your absence

This is great for handling work emails when you are away, but it can also be used with personal emails, too. Here we use iCloud because it’s much better for this sort of thing due to being online 24/7.

Step-by-step

Set up email forwarding

1 Open iCloud Mail

Go to iCloud.com. Sign in and then open the Mail app. It is an online version of the Mac/iOS Mail app. Click the Settings icon in the sidebar followed by Preferences>Rules.

2 Add a rule

There are other ways to set up mail forwarding as we will see, but creating an email rule offers the most features and flexibility. Click the link, ‘Add a Rule’ to begin.

3 Set the trigger

Click ‘If a message’ and choose a trigger. Select ‘is addressed to’ and add your email to forward everything. However, let’s get creative and use ‘has subject containing’.

4 Selective forwarding

Suppose you want to only forward emails about a particular subject (you can create other rules to forward other topics elsewhere). Enter a word/phrase to look for.