Out-of-office reply

An out-of-office reply is the automatic message a mail system sends when its owner has switched on an absence notice. It usually states that the person is away, when they will be back, and sometimes who is covering. It is sent to anyone who writes, so it reacts to your email arriving, whatever the email said.

For outbound it is both a nuisance and a gift. A nuisance, because a team that counts it as a response overstates its results, and a sequence that treats it as a human answer reacts to nobody. A gift, because it hands you two things a cold email rarely gets: a date on which your prospect will be back at a desk clearing a backlog, and often the name of a colleague who is handling their work right now. Writing to that colleague, with a reference to the absence, is one of the more natural openings in cold outreach. Pausing the original prospect until the return date and then following up is the second.

In Seegnals out-of-office messages are classified as Autoreply / Out of office and shown as Autoreplied in campaign stats, apart from Replied. If the classifier misreads a real answer as an absence notice, you reclassify with one click.