Email Autoresponders are often used as an effective internet marketing tool, to immediately provide information to the prospective customers and then follow-up with them at a convenient time. These are regarded as an integral part of building and enhancing customer relationship for any internet-based business.

Parallels Plesk Panel comes with an easy-to-use autoresponder tool, which can be configured to send out automatic response on receipt of an email. In this tutorial, we will be guiding you through the process of configuring an email autoresponder in Plesk hosting control panel.
STEP 1: Login to your Plesk Panel home page. Scroll down to the “Services” section. Click on the first icon, “Mail”, listed there.
STEP 2: Under the section titled “Mail Names”, you can find the list of email addresses associated with your domain name. Select the email on which you would like to configure the autoresponder.
STEP 3: In the “Tools” section, scroll towards the right and click on the “Autoresponders” icon.
STEP 4: Three icons will be listed in this interface. Click on the first icon titled “Add New Autoresponder”. Just below, you will be able to see the list of all existing autoresponders. If this is the first autoresponder that you are creating, the list will be empty and it will show “No items”.
STEP 5: This is the interface where you will actually create the structure of your autoresponder. Provide a name of your choice (no specific syntax, it’s just for your reference) in the “Autoresponder Name” input box.
“Request Text” input box, which is optional in nature, can be used to specify a string of texts, which, if present in the subject and/or body of the received email, will result in triggering the automatic response. Leave this field blank and choose the option “always respond” if you would like the autoresponder to reply to each and every email.
The field “Answer with subject” can be used to send out emails with a standard subject line, such as “Thanks for your email; you will be responded within 24 hours”.
STEP 6: The next input box to be filled in is “Return address”, which is again optional in nature. This field can be used to direct any repeated response from the same person to another email address, so that it does not land again in the autoresponder mailbox and thus create a loop.
“Reply with text” is the main body of your email that you want to convey to the email sender – so enter the message that you wish to send.
You also need to mention the “Limits”. Specify the maximum number of responses that you want to send to a particular email address per day, in-case you receive multiple emails from that address. Please note that it’s a mandatory field.
“Store up to” field can be used to save a number of unique email addresses in the autoresponder memory. Using the “Forward request to email” function, you can even specify another email address to which all the incoming mails will get auto-forwarded. This feature can be used in a situation where you don’t have access to your domain mailbox, but you want to get the emails to one of your public email applications such as Gmail or Hotmail.
If you want to attach a file with the automatic response, you can use the “Add New Attachment” button to browse to your hard disk drive and upload a file. Now you are all set to save the settings. Scroll down and click on the “OK” button that can be located at the bottom the page.
STEP 7: The last step is to enable the autoresponder. Go back to the “Tools” page (Step-4) and scroll down to the list of autoresponders. Select the one that you have just created. Scroll upwards and click on the “Enable” icon.
Your email address is now configured to send out automatic responses as soon as a new email lands in your inbox.