Set up an out-of-office reply

Turn on the reply

1. Open Settings → Auto-reply and turn on Reply automatically.
2. Check the Subject. It starts as “Out of office”: change it if you like.
3. Write your Message: how long you’re away, and who to contact in the meantime.
4. In Once per sender every … days, choose how often the same person gets it: from 1 to 30 days, 7 by default.

There’s no save button: the tab saves as you change it. The reply starts working as soon as the message is written.

Reply only on your days away

Below the message, From and Until limit the reply to your time away, so you can set it up before you leave.

• With both set, it answers from the start of the From day to the end of the Until day.
• With only From, it starts on that day and goes on until you turn it off.
• With only Until, it answers from now until the end of that day.
• With neither, it answers until you turn Reply automatically off.

Outside the dates it stays quiet, even with Reply automatically on. The days follow the mail server’s time zone.

Who gets the reply

mello is careful about who gets the reply:

• Only people who wrote to you directly, with your address or one of your aliases in To or Cc. Mail that reached you as Bcc gets no reply.
• Never newsletters, mailing lists or automatic senders, such as no-reply addresses, and never mail marked as spam.
• Not blocked senders. See blocking a sender.
• Once per sender in the number of days you chose, however often they write. If you change the subject or the message, the next mail from them gets the new reply.

From the command line or an assistant

The reply is the same one everywhere. Besides the webmail, the mello CLI can show and change it (mello auto-reply show, mello auto-reply set), and so can an AI assistant you’ve connected to mello: see connect ChatGPT and Claude. What you change there shows on the Auto-reply tab.

If your filters are a Sieve script of your own, these settings don’t apply: change the reply in your script. See your own Sieve script.