Check out how easy it is to set up this essential process with your email account in this video I’ve posted to my YouTube channel.
Thankfully, setting this up in Gmail is easy to do and only takes a few minutes. Here are step-by-step instructions for setting your out-of-office message, plus some helpful examples you can steal for your own use:

Click the Out Of Office tab, and in the Date & Time Conditions - One-off section, click + Add date range. Set a date range by clicking the date fields and then selecting a start and end date from the calendars. Set a start/finish time for the dates by clicking the time fields and then dragging the sliders horizontally to select the Hour and Minute. If you want your autoresponse to look like a human response, you can tell eDesk to delay sending this template for x minutes. Pro-tip: You can use this to prevent Amazon from detecting your message as an auto-response. Set Frequency if you want to prevent eDesk from auto-responding with the same template to every message about the same ticket. For OOO templates, it is common practice to select Autoreply every single incoming message but you can also select a frequency, for example, once every 6 hours. If you want to tell eDesk NOT to auto-respond with this template to messages from certain email addresses, enter them into the Exclude field, for example, [email protected], [email protected]. You can also exclude all email addresses from a certain domain by entering *@domain.com, for example, *@xsellco.com Tick this if you want to include the signature for the channel in the template.
The example above (which comes from NY Times) may not take advantage of some of the tips we mentioned, but it’s great because it’s so short. Due to its absent-minded straightforwardness, such a message can be perceived as a real, non-automated reply — as if you were so busy that you only carved out a few seconds to type these five words.