This is a reminder to only use MCommunity for your out of office notifications and not U-M Google Mail’s vacation responder.
The MCommunity Directory and U-M Google Mail both offer out of office/away/vacation message features. However, we strongly recommend the use of MCommunity because it has been specifically designed to work within the U-M computing environment. Using Gmail’s native feature has been known to cause issues with recipients of out of office messages.
The most common known error caused by the use of Gmail’s vacation responder occurs when someone emails an MCommunity group of which you are a member. If you are a member of an MCommunity group and have Gmail’s vacation responder turned on, the individual sending the message to the group will not get your vacation response. An error message will be sent to all owners of that MCommunity group instead. We have no control over this behavior as it is originating from Google. The MCommunity service minimizes these notifications to group owners as it keeps track of who sends you email while you are away and only generates one automated reply to a given sender in a three-day period.
Learn more about the benefits of using MCommunity’s Away Message and how to use it on the ITS documentation page.