Aliases allow users to send and receive under another email address without needing to set up an entire second account. Aliases are used in the workspace often so that employees can receive email both under a personalized address (like jdoe@fancyworkplace.com) as well as under a job title address (accountant@fancyworkplace.com). Some people use aliases to wear “different hats,” instead of switching between accounts. In Gmail, once you have an alias attached to your account, you can send from that address for any email, and you’ll receive anything sent to that address. But how do you set up an “out of office” reply for an alias address specifically? (It’s not the same way you do it for your main account!)
As of this writing, there’s no native way in Google or Gmail to set up an auto-reply / out of office / vacation response for an alias, but you can use filters to create a workaround. (It’s definitely a workaround, but it does work.)
First, go to settings in Gmail > All Settings > Advanced and make sure Templates are enabled.
Then hit compose like you are about to write an email. Write what you want your out of office or auto-reply message to be. Leave the recipient field blank, but add a subject that makes sense. Once it’s good, go to the bottom of the message and click the three dots.
Choose Templates > Save draft as template > Save as new template and name it appropriately (like, “Out of Office”). You can close the composed email.
Finally, under settings again, go to filters and create a filter for messages “To:<your alias>” and choose “create filter.” You’ll get an option of what to do with these, and you can choose “Send template” and pick the one you created. Save the filter and this should send an automatic message to anything sent to <your alias> as long as it’s enabled.
The annoying thing is that you will need create a filter each time you want to make this happen. The template you make should save just fine– You can overwrite it if you want– but after you are done using the auto-reply, you’ll need to delete the filter to stop it from churning away.
It’s not a perfect process, but it does work! Happy auto-replying!