Creating An Out of Office or Vacation Reply

Turn your vacation reply on or off

Set up your vacation reply

1. Log into your employee email
2. In the top right, click Settings > See all settings.
3. Scroll down to the "Vacation responder" section.
4. Select Vacation responder on.
5. Fill in the date range, subject, and message.
6. Under your message, check the box if you only want your contacts to see your vacation reply.
7. At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.

Note: If you have a Gmail signature, it will be shown at the bottom of your vacation response.

Turn off your vacation reply

When your vacation reply is on, you'll see a banner across the top of your inbox that shows the subject of your vacation response.

To turn off your vacation response, click End now.

When your vacation reply is sent

Your vacation reply starts at 12:00 AM on the start date and ends at 11:59 PM on the end date, unless you end it earlier.

In most cases, your vacation response is only sent to people the first time they message you.

Here are the times someone may see your vacation response more than once:

• If the same person contacts you again after four days and your vacation reply is still on, they'll see your vacation response again.
• Your vacation response starts over each time you edit it. If someone gets your initial vacation response, then emails you again after you've edited your response, they'll see your new response.
• If you use Gmail through your work, school, or other organization, you can choose whether your response is sent to everyone or only people in your organization.

Tip: Messages sent to your spam folder and messages addressed to a mailing list you subscribe to won't get your vacation response.

Find out-of-office status

You can find the out-of-office statuses in Gmail.

If someone is away from the office, Gmail shows their out of office status when you compose an email to them. You can still send the email, but they might not reply until they return. If you have Chat enabled in Gmail, you'll also get their out of office status when you send a direct message.

If someone doesn't have permission to view your out of office event, Gmail won't show you're out of office.

Share your out of office status

To show others that you're out of office, share your calendar and create an out of office event. The event needs to span all day or extend past your working hours.