Mobile stations, methods, functionality, and articles of manufactures enable mobile stations to automatically respond to a messaging service message. An application is stored and executed on a mobile station. The application provides functionality to determine response message content for use by the application, receive a mobile messaging service message, and respond automatically, without interaction by the end-user of the mobile station, send a response to the received mobile messaging service message containing the message content for the sender of the received mobile messaging service message. The automatic response application may be user activated or automatically activated under various circumstances including at a specific time, on a regularly scheduled basis, upon detection of movement faster than a predetermined speed, or upon detection of the station being in a mobile vehicle.