Time off

Planning a vacation or time away from work? Schedule time off in Front to automatically set yourself as out of office, update your shifts, and reply to your personal emails while you're away. 

Time off auto-responders are available for individual email channels only. See this article to learn how to create an out-of-office reply for shared inboxes.

• Automatically change your Front status: At your specified Start time, your status will change to Out of office. At the End time, your status will switch back to Available. If you're using shifts, see the Time off & shifts section below for additional details.

• Send auto-responses: If you've enabled a time off auto-responder, any inbound message sent to the channel you've selected will begin receiving your auto-responder's message as a reply, once every 4 days at most. The auto-responder will automatically stop sending after your specified End time. If needed, you can disable the auto-responder at any time to pause it.

• Set auto-responses for multiple channels: If you have multiple individual channels, you can select more than one channel in your time off auto-responder settings, or you can create separate auto-responders for different channels.

At your specified time off Start time, your status will change to Out of office. At the End time, your status will switch back to Available, unless you belong to a shift and the End time is outside of your shift hours.

• If you're in an active shift, your status will not switch to Available if you have scheduled time off. If you manually set your status as Available during your time off, your shift will set your status to Out of office when the shift ends.

• During your time off, your analytics are calculated based on workspace or inbox business hours instead of your shift hours.

Step 1

Click the gear icon and navigate to your personal settings. Select Schedule in the sidebar, then click Create time off.

Step 2

Fill out the fields:

• Name: The name will not appear anywhere on the recipient's end.

• Start time: Select the date and time you'd like your time off to start.

• End time: Select the date and time for the last day of your time off. If left blank, the time off auto-responder will run indefinitely.

• Enable auto-responder (optional): Select if you want auto-responses to be sent during your time off. If enabled, select the individual channels the auto-responder should apply to.

  • Only send to contacts: Toggle on if you only want the auto-responder to be sent to people in your contacts.

  • Text box: Write the contents of your auto-response. You can also use variables that will be replaced dynamically.

Step 3

Click Create.

Step 4 (optional)

You can edit or delete your time off at any time by clicking on your time off, or using the three-dot menu.

An auto-responder may fail to reply to messages. There are some reasons why this might happen:

• The inbound message was auto-generated. Front will not send any auto-responses to auto-generated messages. e.g., no-reply notifications, delivery receipts.

• That recipient already received your auto-response within the last 4 days. Front sends your auto-response to a given recipient at most once every 4 days.

• The inbound message was not addressed directly to your channel. An auto-response is only sent when the message is addressed directly to your channel's connected address. For example, if michelle@acme.com is the email address connected to Front:

  • Emails sent directly to michelle@acme.com should generally receive auto-responses.

  • If michellethorton@acme.com is an alias of michelle@acme.com, emailing michellethorton@ will deliver messages to Front via the michelle@ channel, but no auto-responses will be sent.

  • Similarly, if Michelle receives messages via a distribution list team@acme.com, those emails will be addressed to the distribution list, not michelle@. While Michelle will receive those messages in Front, no auto-response will be sent.

No. Front considers the time off settings at the moment the event occurs. If you set time off for a past date, those events have already been processed and the metrics won't retroactively update.

If you manually change your status to Available during the time off period, you will remain Available for the remainder of the time. The auto-responder will still reply to messages when you are set to Available during the time off period.

If you manually change your status to Available, then back to Out of office during your time off period, you will remain Out of office for the remainder of the time. Your status will automatically change to Available on the time off end date.

Time off is available on all plans. Shifts is available on the Enterprise plan.