How to set up an automatic reply

Auto reply is a critical tool for business and personal Proton Mail users alike. If you’re away from your emails and want to let people know when you’ll be back, or you just need to respond to all incoming emails with the same email, here’s how you can set up your out-of-office or vacation auto-response email.

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Note: Proton Mail’s autoresponder applies to your entire Proton Mail account, including across multiple alias emails. If you want to set up an automatic response for just one of your email addresses, or only for specific contacts, you can do this by creating a custom filter.

Setting up an auto reply message

Proton Mail’s auto-reply feature allows you to automatically send replies to incoming messages. This will reply to anyone who tries to send you a message with a custom automatic response, for example, that you are out of the office.

1. Go to Settings → All settings → Proton Mail → Auto reply and toggle the Auto reply switch on.

2. This will trigger the auto-reply menu, where you can set the parameters (day, time, date, and duration) of your auto response.

3. Type your auto reply message into the Message field. By default, the message will show “I’m out of the office with limited access to my email.”

4. Click Save and re-enter your password when prompted.

Your auto response will now apply across your entire Proton Mail account until it reaches the end date and time, or if you disable it.

Timespan settings for auto-reply messages

You can use the Duration settings to select the timespan that your auto reply will use to respond to your contacts. Choose from:

• Fixed duration
• Repeat daily
• Repeat weekly
• Repeat monthly
• Permanent

Fixed duration will ensure your auto replies are active between two selected dates, starting and ending at the times and dates you specify.

Repeat daily allows you to choose the days of the week where auto reply is active. You may also restrict auto reply to certain hours on the specified days.  Auto reply will always reply within the specified timeframe; it will not send replies outside of these times. If you set the start time equal to the end time, auto reply will always be active on the specified days.

For instance, if you select every Monday and Tuesday between 12:00 and 15:00, the auto reply will be activated for all emails received between 12:00 and 15:00 on those days. Emails received outside of these hours will not activate auto reply.

Repeat weekly gives you the ability to choose a section of the week where your auto replies will always be on. For example, setting an out-of-office response every Saturday and Sunday.

Repeat monthly gives you the option to choose a section of the month to turn on your auto reply. For example, if you are busy for the first week of every month you could set an auto reply for the 1st to the 7th of each month to say you will have limited access to your emails.

Permanent ensures that your auto reply will stay on indefinitely until you switch it off.

Disabling your auto reply message

If you have set a date in the End date and End time fields, your auto reply will remain active until you manually disable it by toggling the Auto reply switch.

If you have set an end date and time for your auto reply, it will automatically stop responding to your contacts once that date and time in the specified time zone has passed.

Auto reply features and filters

Auto reply will not repeatedly send messages to the same email address unless you reconfigure the rules between received messages. When receiving multiple emails from the same email address, auto reply will only respond with one email.

Auto reply will not respond to automatically generated messages. Automatically generated messages include emails from mailing lists, emails sent via auto reply from a different email address, and messages sent from a noreply address.

To send auto replies to only selected contacts, or for just one of your alias email addresses, you will need to set up a custom filter(новое окно). After setting up the Conditions for which emails you want to trigger an automatic response, select Send auto reply in the Actions stage.

You can then Preview your auto-reply email, or click Save to apply the filter.