Setting up autoresponders (out-of-office replies).

Going on vacation? Acknowledging support tickets automatically? cPanel autoresponders cover both cases.

Create an autoresponder

cPanel → Autoresponders → Add Autoresponder:

• Character set: UTF-8 (always)
• Interval (hours): 24 (sends max 1 reply per sender per 24 hours — important to avoid loops)
• Email: the mailbox the responder is attached to
• From: display name
• Subject: subject of the auto-reply
• HTML message: check if your body is HTML
• Body: the actual text
• Start: Immediately, or schedule a future date
• Stop: when to turn off (or "Never")

Save.

Vacation example

Subject: I'm out of office until 15 May
 
Hi,
 
Thanks for your email. I'm away from my desk until 15 May 2026.
 
For urgent matters, please contact my colleague at colleague@yourdomain.com.
For general questions, my team will respond when I return.
 
Best,
Your Name

Support acknowledgement example

Subject: We received your message — Rivervo Support
 
Hi {sender's name},
 
Thanks for reaching out to Rivervo Support. We've received your message and one of our engineers will respond within 4 hours.
 
In the meantime:
- Help center: https://rivervo.com/help
- Status page: https://uptime.rivervo.com
 
If you need immediate help, reply with "URGENT" in the subject and our on-call team gets paged.
 
— The Rivervo Team

Important — interval to avoid loops

The Interval (hours) setting prevents your auto-reply from triggering THEIR auto-reply, which triggers YOUR auto-reply, etc. — known as "mail loops" and can spike a queue to 10,000+ messages in minutes.

24 hours is a safe default. Lower than 4 is risky.

Variables in the body

cPanel autoresponders support these placeholders:

• %subject% — the original message's subject
• %from% — sender's name as parsed from the From header
• %email% — sender's email address

Use them like:

Hi %from%,
 
Thanks for your message about "%subject%". I'll respond when I'm back.

Stopping early

If you came back early from vacation:

cPanel → Autoresponders → click the trash icon next to the rule.

Or Edit → set Stop to "Immediately".

Why your autoresponder might not fire

Sender's mail server doesn't expect responses. Some mailing lists (noreply@, notifications@) put Auto-Submitted: auto-generated headers. SpamAssassin and our autoresponder logic skip those — to prevent loops with newsletters.

Sender's mail bounced. If the original mail was undeliverable (bad SPF, in spam, blocked), there's nothing to reply to.

Outside the schedule window. Check Start/Stop dates.

Same sender within 24h. They got their auto-reply already; the next one waits 24 hours.

What NOT to put in autoresponders

• Don't reveal you're traveling and the house is empty. "I'm in Bali for 3 weeks!" → hello, burglars.
• Don't promise specific response times you can't deliver. "I'll respond within 1 hour" — even on holidays?
• Don't include too much personal info. Cybercriminals scrape autoresponders for OOO patterns.

Generic, professional, brief.

Alternative: filters + canned response

For more sophisticated handling (auto-reply only to messages with specific keywords, route certain senders to specific replies), use cPanel Email Filters with custom logic. Beyond the scope of this article — open a ticket if you need help configuring this.