What Is an Out-of-Office Reply?
TL;DR
An out-of-office reply is an automatic response telling the sender that the recipient is away, usually with return dates and often a colleague to contact instead. In outreach it is not engagement, so counting it as a reply overstates results, but the message itself frequently carries data worth keeping.
How should an out-of-office reply be handled?
Paused, not stopped. Treating it as a reply ends the sequence for someone who has not read a word, and treating it as nothing sends the next touch into an inbox that will be triaged in bulk on the day they return.
The clean handling is to pause the contact until the stated return date and resume a day or two after it. That requires parsing the date out of the message, which is why out-of-office detection belongs in the inbox classification step rather than in the reply count.
What data does an out-of-office reply give you?
More than most genuine replies. It confirms the mailbox is live and monitored, it often names a delegate with a title and a direct address, and it gives a date to schedule the next touch against.
Occasionally it says more than intended. A permanent auto-reply announcing that someone has left the company invalidates the contact record and names their replacement, which is a data update the campaign got for free.
Frequently asked questions
No, it should pause it. A stop removes a contact who never saw the message, and continuing on schedule delivers the next touch into the backlog waiting for them when they return. Pausing until the stated return date is the handling that keeps the sequence intact.