We're fully into the Vacation Season, being after Memorial Day, and Independence Day conveniently falling right next to the weekend.  Before you get Vacation-itis, where you can't focus on non-holiday related tasks, don't forget to set up your Out of Office rules, and go No Mail on mailing lists.  Spare your fellow list members. And spare your inbox. 

You know what I mean, you've come back from vacation to a mailbox so full you don't know what to look at full, and if you're really unlucky, you've blown your quota and have to sort through it to get the rest of your email you don't really want to have to look at anyway.  Don't fear the inbox, spare it from your lack of attention.

Many discussion groups on sites like Yahoo or Google, so it's easy to set yourself No Mail, and still be able to access the mail through a browser, while sparing your mailbox quota from mail you know you'll never read when you get back from two weeks in Europe.  If you really need those emails, most discussion groups add a prefix to the subject line (i.e., [InfoGeeks Anonymous]) so can easily be added into a conditional rule for your mail client. 

To get you started, here are the basics for Outlook, Lotus Notes, and Yahoo Groups:


1.  Outlook  (2003 specific)
Out of Office allows you to set conditions for Out of Office replies and Rules.  The easiest way to set a condition related to mail lists is to set a condition related on text in the message header, which will look in the To, From, Date, and Subject fields for the text strings. 

For example, to prevent auto-replies from going to InfoGeeks Anonymous, the condition would be "Except if the message header contains '[InfoGeeks Anonymous]'".


2.  Lotus Notes
a.  Go to Actions > Tools > Out of Office
b.  Select Exceptions Tab
c.  In the "Do not automatically reply if the subject contains these phrases field" add the appropriate text string.

For example, to prevent auto-replies from going to InfoGeeks Anonymous, add the text string "[InfoGeeks Anonymous]'".


3.  Yahoo Groups
You can set your groups preferences to No Mail, and still be able to access the messages on the website, without filling up your mailbox.   I'm particularly fond of No Mail for yahoo groups. 

Method #1
a.  Go to http://groups.yahoo.com/mygroups
b.  Select Edit Groups
c.  Under Message Delivery Column, change to No Mail for all desired groups
d.  Save changes

Method #2: 
a. Go to each group separately:
b.  Select Edit Membership on upper, left hand side of screen, above the yellow bar with the group name and description
c.  Go to Step 2 Step 2. Message Delivery and select the radio button next to Web Only
d.  Save Changes