How to Set Up an Email Autoresponder in Plesk

This guide shows you how to set up an email autoresponder on a mailbox in Plesk, so that anyone who writes to you receives an automatic reply while you are away. The feature is called Auto-Reply in Plesk, but you will also hear it described as an autoresponder, a vacation message or an out-of-office reply. They all mean the same thing: a message the mail server sends back on your behalf, without you lifting a finger, until you switch it off. It is written for Noiz email clients whose mailbox lives on the Noiz Plesk mail platform.

Because the auto-reply runs on the server, it works no matter how you normally read your mail. You do not need to leave your computer on, keep webmail open, or sign in from anywhere. Once it is enabled, Plesk answers your incoming mail around the clock until the day you tell it to stop.

Last reviewed: 27 July 2026, against Plesk Obsidian (latest stable). This guide is written for Noiz hosting and is kept current against Plesk. It complements, and does not replace, the official Plesk documentation linked below. Plesk updates regularly and the exact wording of one or two Auto-Reply fields (for example the reply-frequency label) can differ slightly between versions, so if a field name on your screen reads a little differently from this guide, the setting it controls is the same one described here.

Official Documentation Reference

• Plesk Obsidian Customer Guide: the official user-facing manual for Plesk, including the Mail chapter that covers mailboxes and their settings.
• Plesk documentation portal: the index to every current Plesk guide, kept in step with the latest release.
• RFC 3834: Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail: the open email standard that describes how a well-behaved autoresponder should work, and why the loop-prevention rules covered below exist.

Prerequisites

• You can log in to Plesk.
• The mailbox you want the auto-reply on already exists. If you have not created it yet, do that first: see How to create an email address in Plesk. An auto-reply can only be attached to a mailbox that has already been set up.
• You have decided, before you start, what the reply should say and the date you expect to be back. Having the wording and the return date ready makes the setup a two-minute job.

Open the Auto-Reply Tab for Your Mailbox

1. Log in to Plesk.
2. In the left-hand menu, click Mail. The list of email addresses on your subscription appears.
3. Click the email address you want to set the auto-reply on, for example [email protected]. The mailbox settings open across a row of tabs.
4. Click the Auto-Reply tab.

Switch On the Auto-Reply and Compose Your Message

1. Tick Switch on auto-reply. The rest of the fields on the tab become editable once this is ticked.
2. In Auto-reply message subject, type the subject line the sender will see on your reply, for example Out of office. Keep it short and self-explanatory so it is clear at a glance that the answer is automatic.
3. Leave Message format as Plain text unless you specifically need bold text or links, in which case choose HTML. Plain text is delivered reliably everywhere and is the right choice for a simple away message. If an encoding option is shown, leave it as UTF-8 so accented characters and symbols display correctly.
4. In the message text box, write the body of your reply. There is a suggested example, and etiquette to follow, in Write a Good Out-of-Office Message further down this page.

Optional Settings: Forwarding, Attachments and Reply Frequency

The remaining fields on the tab are optional. You can safely leave them at their defaults for a straightforward away message, but each one is useful in the right situation.

Forward Incoming Mail to a Colleague

Use Forward requests to the address when you want someone to actually deal with mail while you are away, not just to have the sender told you are out. Enter a colleague's full email address, for example [email protected], and Plesk sends a copy of each incoming message to that address at the same time as it sends the automatic reply. Leave this field empty if you only want the auto-reply and no forwarding. Whoever you forward to should know they are covering your mailbox, so nothing is missed.

Attach a File to the Reply

Use Attach a file to the automatic reply message when every reply should carry the same document, such as a price list, a contact sheet or a holiday-schedule PDF. Upload the file and it is sent with each automatic reply. Keep attachments small and few: a large attachment sent to every single sender wastes their inbox space and yours, and can trip spam filters. For most away messages, no attachment is the better choice.

Limit How Often Each Sender Is Answered

Plesk limits how many times it will send the automatic reply to the same sender within a single day. This is the single most important setting for good behaviour, and it exists to stop your mailbox firing off a fresh reply to every message in a long back-and-forth thread. Set a low number here; answering each unique sender once a day is almost always the right choice. A person who emails you five times in one afternoon then receives one courteous away message, not five identical ones. This same limit is part of how Plesk prevents reply loops, explained in How Plesk Prevents Auto-Reply Loops below.

Set an End Date so the Auto-Reply Switches Itself Off

An auto-reply that you forget to turn off is the classic mistake: it keeps telling people you are on leave weeks after you are back at your desk. Plesk solves this for you.

1. Find the Switch off auto-reply on date field.
2. Set it to the day you return, for example the first working day back. Plesk turns the automatic reply off by itself on that date, so you do not have to remember.

There is no separate start-date field: the auto-reply begins working the moment you save it with Switch on auto-reply ticked. So enable it on the day you actually leave, not days in advance, and let the end date take care of switching it off. If your plans change and you return early, you can turn it off by hand at any time, as shown in Turn the Auto-Reply Off.

Save and Test

1. Click OK (or Apply) at the bottom of the tab to save the auto-reply.
2. From a different email account, such as a personal address, send a short message to the mailbox you have just set up.
3. Within a minute or two the automatic reply should arrive back at that other account. Read it as your correspondents will, and check the subject line, the wording and the return date all read correctly.
4. Send a second test message from the same account to confirm the reply-frequency limit is doing its job: with a once-a-day limit, the second message should not produce a second automatic reply.

Write a Good Out-of-Office Message

The wording of an away message is what your customers and colleagues actually read, so it is worth getting right. A good one is brief, tells the reader what they need to know, and gives them a way forward. Cover these points:

• That you are away, and until when. A specific return date is far more useful than a vague "I am currently unavailable".
• Who to contact instead, for anything urgent. Give a name and a monitored email address, or a phone number, so time-critical matters are not stranded in your inbox.
• What will happen to their message. Say whether you will reply on your return, so the sender knows they do not need to chase or resend.

A short, professional example you can adapt:

Subject: Out of office until 5 August

Thank you for your email. I am out of the office until
Monday 5 August and will not be reading messages during
this time.

For anything urgent, please contact Sam Nkosi at
[email protected] or on 021 000 0000.

I will reply to your message when I return.

Kind regards,
Your Name

Two etiquette points worth keeping in mind. First, keep it professional even for an internal address, because you cannot control who ends up writing to you. Second, remember that an auto-reply confirms to every sender that the address is live and monitored, including spammers who mail it at random. Plesk's loop protection stops it answering mail that clearly looks automated, but the more you can keep the message plain and free of personal detail such as your exact travel dates or your mobile number, the better. For an address that receives a lot of unwanted mail, weigh up whether an auto-reply is worth switching on at all; the article on how to determine the source of spam and reduce it is a useful companion.

How Plesk Prevents Auto-Reply Loops

An autoresponder that simply replied to everything would be dangerous. Picture two mailboxes, both on holiday auto-reply, that happen to email each other: the first replies, which triggers the second to reply, which triggers the first again, and the two servers bounce identical messages back and forth thousands of times. This is a mail loop, and in the early days of email it was a real way to fill up mailboxes and overload servers.

The open email standard RFC 3834 sets out how a responsible autoresponder should behave to avoid this, and Plesk follows those rules for you:

• It never answers the same sender more than the daily limit you set. This is the reply-frequency field described above. Even if two auto-replies did somehow reach each other, the per-day cap breaks the loop almost immediately, which is exactly why keeping that number low (once a day) matters.
• It does not reply to mail that looks automated. Newsletters, mailing-list messages, delivery-failure notices and other autoresponders are generally marked as bulk or automatic in their headers, and a well-behaved responder, including Plesk's, leaves them alone. That also means your holiday reply will not flood the mailing lists you are subscribed to.

You do not have to configure any of this; it is built in. The one part that is in your hands is the daily reply limit, so set it sensibly and the rest is taken care of.

Turn the Auto-Reply Off

If you set an end date, Plesk switches the auto-reply off on that day automatically and there is nothing more to do. To turn it off by hand, for example if you return early:

1. Go to Mail, click the email address, and open the Auto-Reply tab.
2. Untick Switch on auto-reply.
3. Click OK or Apply to save. Your reply text and settings are kept, so you can switch the same message back on next time you are away without retyping it.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: the automatic reply is not being sent. Open the Auto-Reply tab and confirm Switch on auto-reply is still ticked and that the settings were saved. Check the Switch off auto-reply on date has not already passed, as Plesk will have turned the reply off on that day. Remember too that Plesk only answers each sender up to the daily limit, so if you are testing from the same address more than once a day, you will not see a second reply; test from a fresh address to confirm.
• Symptom: I set it up but I am back and it is still replying. Either no end date was set, or the date was set later than the day you actually returned. Open the tab and untick Switch on auto-reply to stop it now, and set a correct Switch off auto-reply on date next time.
• Symptom: senders receive several identical replies. The reply-frequency limit is set too high. Lower it so each unique sender is answered no more than once a day.
• Symptom: the reply text shows strange characters or question marks. The encoding does not match the characters you used. If an encoding option is available, set it to UTF-8, then re-save; UTF-8 handles accented letters, currency symbols and punctuation correctly.
• Symptom: the Auto-Reply tab is missing. Some mailbox types, such as a plain forwarding-only address with no mailbox storage, do not have their own auto-reply. Make sure the address is a full mailbox rather than a forwarder or alias. If you are unsure, the Noiz support team can confirm how the address is configured.
• Symptom: mail sent to me while I am away is not being kept. The auto-reply does not stop your normal mail being delivered; incoming messages still arrive in your mailbox to read on your return. If you also want a colleague to handle mail meanwhile, set Forward requests to the address as described above.

If your auto-reply still does not behave as you expect, open a support ticket with the Noiz support team. Include the mailbox address, what you set on the Auto-Reply tab, and, if a reply went astray, the sending address and roughly when it was sent. On Noiz managed plans the support team can check how the mailbox and its autoresponder are configured on the server side and put it right for you.