follow-up-mails-out-of-officelisted

# Follow-up mails for out-of-office replies Use Gmail to handle out-of-office (OOO) replies to outreach or partner emails. The goal is to follow up once at an appropriate time without contacting people who are still away or duplicating a prior follow-up. ## Find and assess OOO replies - Search unread inbox mail for relevant terms such as `"out of office"`, `OOO`, `PTO`, `vacation`, `traveling`, `away`, and `returning`. - Read the full reply and its surrounding thread before deciding. Snippets may omit a return date, reason, or an existing reply. - Ignore messages that are not OOO replies, even if they appear in the same search. - Deduplicate by person, not by Gmail thread. A partner may have several auto-replies from repeated outreach. Send at most one new follow-up per partner unless the user explicitly asks for one per thread. Classify each partner: - **Eligible:** their stated return date has passed. - **Needs direction:** their OOO has no return date. Report them separately; draft or send only if the user explicitly includes them after review. - **Do not contact yet:** a future return date, parental leave, or another clearly ongoing absence. Before drafting, search the partner's recent mail to see whether a follow-up was already sent. Do not create another one if it has. ## Write the follow-up Use the partner's first name and adapt the opening to the stated reason: ```text Hi [First name], Hope [your vacation / your time away / the conference or offsite] went we