How do I set up Email and Voice Mail Messages for Winter Break?
by Jeff van de Pol
 
You AskedBefore you leave for your holiday break, an important item on your checklist should be the management of electronic and phone messages during your absence. This can prevent miscommunications and inconveniences for your students, clients, instructors, or friends trying to contact you. It can also prevent a backlog of email or voice mail messages, particularly if you subscribe to email lists with heavy traffic or if you are a list owner. In the case of email, if you have a large enough backlog of messages, your disk quota could be exceeded, causing subsequent messages to "bounce." You can check your email quota status on the Web.

Setting Up Absence Notifications
A popular message management solution is setting up email and voice mail absence notifications. These messages provide a convenient way to automatically inform anyone trying to contact you that you're on vacation. Other possible options include setting up another email program at your vacation destination or using Web-based email. The university's own MyUCDavis allows you to check your email from anywhere that you happen to be accessing the internet. To learn more about how to check your email away from home, see the UC Davis email Web site.

Email Vacation Message. To set up an email notification message for your UC Davis account, a tool is available on the Web. To use it, you will need the following:

  • A UCD LoginID (i.e., the name you use to access the campus network, MyUCDavis, or other major computing systems). To verify your LoginID, go to UC Davis Computing Account Services and click on "Check the Status of Your UCD LoginID."

  • A Kerberos password. If you think you've forgotten your password, go to UC Davis Computing Account Services and follow the instructions under "Test Your Password."

  • An account on one of the campus email servers (blue, green, scarlet, purple, yellow, or mailbox). All UC Davis computing accounts have automatically been assigned one of these servers. To check which server you are on, visit the UCD MailID Detective and enter your mailID (i.e., the set of characters before the @ucdavis.edu in your email address). The name of one of the email servers will appear after the @ symbol.

An important reminder: be sure to disable this message upon your return, or people will still think you are on vacation! When you're ready to set up the notification message (and to disable it upon your return), go to http://email.ucdavis.edu/ and click on "email vacation utility." You will be prompted to enter your UCD LoginID and your Kerberos password. If you have any questions about the email notification tool, contact the UC Davis Postmaster at postmaster@ucdavis.edu.

Voice Mail Absence Greetings. If you subscribe to a UC Davis voice mail plan, follow these steps to create an extended absence greeting:
  1. Access your mailbox by dialing 2-8629 from campus or (530) 752-8629 from off-campus.
  2. Select option 4, Personal Options, from the Main Menu.
  3. Select option 3, Record Greetings, from the Personal Options menu.
  4. Select option 2, Create an Extended Absence Greeting, from the Record Greetings menu.
  5. Record your greeting.
From then on, whenever you check messages, the voice mail system will give you the option to retain or delete the extended absence greeting.

Depending on your plan (Subscriber or SubscriberPlus), the maximum number of days that new messages will be stored is 14 or 21, respectively. The maximum number of messages that a voice mailbox can hold is 30 or 50, respectively.

For more information on voice mail and its capabilities, refer to your VoiceMail User Guide or contact the IET-Communications Resources Network Services Center at (530) 752-4603.

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