Knowledge base
Out of office
An automatic reply from one address while you are away, with a start, an end and your own words.
Details
- Each address has an Out of office tab under Settings → Addresses, and so does a catch-all. A person signed in to one address can set their own, and the phone app has the same tab. It holds a switch, a start, an end, a subject, the message as plain text and “Only reply to my contacts”. An empty end keeps the reply on until you switch it off, and an empty subject answers with Re: and the subject received.
- Each sender gets one reply for the whole away period, per address. Changing the start begins a new period in which everyone is answered once more, and changing only the text or the end date does not. With no end date a sender is answered again after 30 days.
- Mail that would not alert anyone gets no reply: spam, and mail a rule moved to the Bin. Neither do newsletters and other bulk mail (List-Id, List-Unsubscribe, or a Precedence of bulk, list or junk), automatic mail (Auto-Submitted, X-Autoreply, X-Autorespond), bounces, blocked senders and the workspace’s own addresses. With “Only reply to my contacts” on, only contacts and people the workspace has written to are answered.
- The reply goes out from the address the mail arrived at, inside the same conversation, marked Auto-Submitted: auto-replied, with open and link tracking off and no signature. It counts toward the monthly sends, and it still goes out on a muted conversation.
- The reply saved for the exact address applies first, then the one for the address without its plus-tag, then the catch-all’s. A catch-all never answers for an address somebody created by hand.
- While a reply is active, a banner on the inbox says so, with Change and Turn off. “Apply to other addresses” copies the reply of one address to others. Nothing runs on a timer: the dates are checked when mail arrives.
- It is separate from the auto-reply action of a rule, which answers with a saved template, at most once per sender per workspace in 24 hours, and knows no dates. Out of office does not use up rules. On the REST API it is GET, PUT and DELETE /out-of-office, on the SDK outOfOffice.list, set and clear, and on the MCP server getOutOfOffice, setOutOfOffice and clearOutOfOffice.