Out-of-office replies in cold email

An out-of-office message is not a reply, and you should not keep following up into it. AY Inbox reads the return date from the away message, holds that lead in every campaign they are in, and resumes one working day after the date. If no date can be read, the hold lasts 7 days by default.

An out-of-office reply (OOO, away message, auto-reply) is a message the recipient's mail server sends on its own while they are on holiday, travelling or on leave. It proves the mailbox is live, but nobody read your email, so treating it as engagement or sending the next step into an empty desk both go wrong.

Why an OOO is not a reply

AY Inbox classifies every reply before it acts on it. An away message is recognised by the subject line the recipient's provider writes (Automatic reply:, Automatische Antwort:, Réponse automatique: and the equivalents in other languages) or by the RFC 3834 and vendor headers it carries. The subject is matched at its start only, so a human reply to a campaign about annual leave is still read as a human reply.

Once a message is classified as an away message:

The reasoning behind that split is in reply classification.

Reading the return date

The hold reads the return date out of the subject and body, with quoted history removed. A cue phrase has to introduce the date, and only the text shortly after the cue is searched, because an auto-reply also quotes signatures, conferences and reference numbers.

Phrasings recognised in every workspace:

Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Polish and Czech phrasings are read too when the workspace adds those tagging languages.

Dates can be written in ISO form (2026-09-08), day-dot-month form (8.9. or 08.09.2026), or with a written month in either order (8 September, September 8). A few rules decide what the date means:

• Inclusive cues name the last day away. through, bis einschliesslich and tot en met mean back the day after. until is read as back on that day, the way most people write it.
• German calendar weeks count. ab KW 42 is read as back on that week's Monday. bis KW 41 is read as back on the Monday after week 41.
• A missing year is the next one that fits. An away message sent in December that says back on 5 January means next January.
• The date must be close. A date in the past, or more than 92 days ahead, is skipped as not the return date. With no other date, the fallback applies.

With automatic inbox tagging on, the date gets a second reading. The classifier is asked whether the phrase the date came from really says when the sender is back. A clear no (for example, the date was the first day of the absence) sends the hold to the fallback instead.

Dates it deliberately ignores

Two kinds of date are never read, because a wrong date parks a live lead for weeks:

• Slash dates. 9/8/2026 is 9 August in Europe and 8 September in the United States. There is no safe way to choose.
• A month with no day. Back in October does not say which day in October.

Both fall back to the workspace's fallback hold, which is short enough to be harmless when the person is back sooner.

The hold

When an away message from a lead arrives in reply to a campaign email, AY Inbox holds that contact's next step. The hold is on by default:

1. Across campaigns. The contact is held in every campaign they are still a lead of, not only the one that was answered. Completed campaigns are left alone, since nothing in them will send again.
2. Until one working day after the return date. A contact back on Monday spends that day on their backlog, so the held step resumes on Tuesday. Only Saturday and Sunday are skipped; public holidays are not known.
3. Or for the fallback. When no date can be read, the hold is the workspace's fallback, 7 days by default. Change it, from 1 to 90 days, or turn the whole behaviour off, under Settings > Sending > Out of office.

An away message never shortens a hold that is already longer, and never replaces a pause a member set by hand.

A held lead reads Paused in the campaign's Leads list, and the reason shows on hover: back 8 Sep 2026 when a date was read, auto-reply, no return date when none was, and auto-reply, return date unclear when the classifier doubted it. When the hold lifts, the step goes back on its normal schedule, inside the campaign's sending window and the mailbox's limits. The full behaviour is in out of office and pausing one lead.

When a copied colleague is away

If you copy a colleague on a lead's emails and the colleague's mailbox sends an away message, nothing is held. The lead is still at their desk, so their follow-ups keep their schedule. Only the lead's own away message holds the lead.

Pausing a lead by hand

Sometimes a person tells you in a real reply that they are away, or you learn it elsewhere. Pause the lead yourself instead of unsubscribing them:

The pause button sits on the lead's row in the campaign, on each campaign in the contact's Activity tab, and in the unibox contact panel. From the CLI:

ayinbox campaign pause-lead CAMPAIGN_ID CONTACT_ID --until 2026-09-21T17:00:00Z --reason "On holiday"
ayinbox campaign resume-lead CAMPAIGN_ID CONTACT_ID

Resume drops the held time rather than carrying it: the step goes out on the campaign's next pass when its moment has already passed, otherwise when its own wait elapses. A lead already held by an out-of-office reply needs no manual pause.

To keep following up with people after they are back until a meeting is booked, see follow up until booked.