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Out-of-office handling

What the CRM knows about auto-replies, and what it does with them.

Three separate things

Your CRM away switch, your mailbox auto-reply, and somebody else's auto-reply.

Out-of-office shows up in three unrelated places, and it helps to keep them apart:

  • Your CRM away switch, which you set yourself in Settings, Profile, with an optional message and a return date.
  • Your mailbox auto-reply, read from your connected Microsoft 365 account so the CRM knows whether Outlook is currently answering for you.
  • Somebody else's auto-reply arriving as a reply to a campaign or a cold outreach sequence, where the useful behaviour is to wait rather than to stop.

The first is a CRM setting and is covered in Profile Settings. Turning it on does not turn on an Outlook auto-reply, and turning on an Outlook auto-reply does not flip it. The other two are below.

Your own auto-reply

Read from Microsoft 365, refreshed in the background.

1

Connect Microsoft 365 with mailbox settings access

The read needs the mailbox-settings permission, which is granted when you connect your Microsoft 365 account. Without it nothing below runs for you, and nothing fails loudly either: there is simply no auto-reply state to read.
2

The CRM refreshes it in the background

A scheduled job runs every six hours and re-reads the auto-reply setting for connected accounts, starting with the accounts whose stored value is oldest. It stores whether the auto-reply is off, always on, or scheduled, along with the scheduled window and the message itself. The stored copy is sanitized when it is written, so no raw mail content is kept.
3

Ask the assistant when you want to know

Ask Laureo whether your auto-reply is on and it answers from that stored copy, tells you the window it is scheduled for, and says when the value was last refreshed so you can judge how current it is.
It is a schedule, not a live read
The stored value is refreshed on a schedule, not the instant you change it in Outlook. If you have just turned your auto-reply on or off, the CRM may still be reporting the previous state until the next refresh. Each run takes the accounts whose stored value is oldest first, so when a lot of accounts are connected a single account can take more than one run to come round. That is why the assistant tells you when the value it read was last refreshed: the timestamp is the answer to how current it is, not the schedule.
This is your own mailbox, not your contacts'
The auto-reply state the CRM reads belongs to connected accounts inside your organization. It is not a lookup on an external contact, so the CRM cannot tell you whether a customer you are about to email is away.

Out-of-office replies to your outreach

Pause the follow-ups instead of killing the sequence.

An automatic reply is not a real reply, so treating it like one throws away a live prospect. Both sending planes can classify one and wait instead.

In cold outreach, a sequence's Reply handling section offers Out of office as its own case, with Wait, then continue as the option that matters. Its Wait (sending days) field sets how many sending days the sequence waits. When it is set, the sequence's stop conditions say so directly under They reply: "Out-of-office replies pause this sequence instead of stopping it."

In campaigns, the same idea rides the campaign's reply rules: an out-of-office reply pushes the remaining follow-ups back by the number of days you set rather than stopping them. On the campaign's recipient list, a reply classified this way is labelled as such, with a note saying the pending follow-ups were rescheduled.

Plan-gated
Reply handling is a paid capability on both planes and is configured per sequence or per campaign. A sequence or campaign with no reply handling configured behaves exactly as it always did: a reply stops the follow-ups.

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