Out of Office¶

While you're away, Out of Office answers your incoming email for you. Each person gets one automatic reply per absence, however many times they write.

Open Settings → Users → your name → Out of Office.

Turn it on¶

1. Turn on the switch at the top. The rest of the form appears.
2. Choose your First day away and Last day away. Leave the last day empty to keep replying until you turn it off.
3. Write Your reply. What they will receive shows it as the other person will see it.
4. Choose Who gets a reply:
   • Outside the company: clients and new enquiries, but not colleagues.
   • Everyone: colleagues too.
   • Clients only: only emails matched to a client. A new enquiry gets no reply.
5. Click Save. Nothing goes out until you do.

If the first day is in the future, the status shows Scheduled and replies start that day. Replies stop on their own after your last day. Your dates follow the Business Timezone in Settings → General.

When your last day has passed, the status shows Ended and no replies go out, even though the switch stays on. To keep going, move your last day later and click Save. Nobody who already had a reply gets another.

To stop early, turn off the switch. Replies stop straight away, and your saved wording is kept for next time. A change you haven't saved isn't used, and leaving the tab loses it.

Who gets a reply¶

Each person gets one reply per absence. A person is the address the reply would go to, so if an email asks for replies to go somewhere else, that's the address that counts. The reply's subject is always "Automatic reply: your email".

Changing your wording, extending your dates or changing who gets a reply doesn't send anyone a second reply. Neither does turning it off and back on within 24 hours. A new absence starts when you turn it on after that, or when your new dates start after your last day away.

Replied to so far lists the people BaseCloud has replied to this absence, the latest 50 at most. On a client's feed, the reply shows like any other email you sent.

BaseCloud doesn't reply to:

• Newsletters, mailing lists and other automated email.
• Addresses nobody reads, such as noreply@.
• Someone else's automatic reply, or a bounced email. Anything with a subject that starts like one, such as "Out of office", counts.
• Email in your Junk folder, or marked as spam on its way to your catch mailbox.
• Calendar invites.
• Email an email rule blocks or deletes.
• Email where you were only BCCed, or that was sent to an address BaseCloud doesn't have for you. Email forwarded to your catch mailbox is the exception, because BaseCloud can't tell how it was addressed.
• Email that arrived before your first day away, or that's more than a day old by the time BaseCloud reads it.
• Your own email.

So that your email isn't treated as spam, BaseCloud sends at most 200 automatic replies for you in 24 hours, and at most 20 of those to any one company's email domain. Free email such as Gmail doesn't count towards the second limit.

Set it from an AI app¶

With an AI connection that has Make changes, you can ask it to set, extend or turn off your Out of Office, for example "I'm away until Friday, set my Out of Office." See What you can ask.

Team mailboxes¶

Out of Office is for your own addresses. Email to a team's shared address doesn't get an automatic reply, because the rest of the team is still reading it.

If a reply doesn't arrive¶

• Check the status at the top of the tab. It should say On.
• Check that the email was addressed to you, and isn't in the list above.
• Your address has to be able to send from BaseCloud: either a connected mailbox or a verified domain. The tab warns you if none of your addresses can send. Each reply goes out from the address the email came to, so that address is the one that has to work.

BaseCloud retries a reply that fails for a moment. If it still can't be sent, that person stays on Replied to so far but gets no reply this absence.