[Google Workspace] Automatic emial reply after 4pm and over the weekend

[k-strider]

we have been asked to look if its possible to automate email responses to emails that arrive after 4 pm that basically say unless its urgent dont expect a reply untill school hours.

 

anyone been asked to do this and any ideas its a bit like every day turning on your oOo at 4pm and turning it back off at 8:30 but automated and idealy from the google admin conslose and ideally only for users in specific ous

[jthompson]

I don't think that's possible without some scripting shenanigans. Even then, that's going to bulldozer over whatever out-of-office options users might want/need to be setting for themselves. To do it, I suspect you'd need to either script some gam commands, or use a service account that can impersonate users and script it using an Apps Script project that does it via the Gmail API (complicated).

 

I used this blog post as the basis for setting up a system that automatically applies Gmail signatures for our staff. The blog post includes the steps necessary to create a service account that can be used in conjunction with calls to the Gmail API to set users' Gmail settings. In this case it's updating their signature, but could presumably be adapted to set/unset their out-of-office.

https://caspan.com/2021/10/google-app-script-set-gmail-signature-template-on-org-users/

 

I'm not a fan of auto-responses though, especially if they're used anything other than sparingly. Email threads can very easily get messy because of them.

 

Our org's standard email footer (Admin > Apps >Google Workspace > Gmail > Compliance > Append footer) for oubound messages includes a bit about repsonse time expectations, working hours, etc. which is our nod to this.

[timbo343]

I googled it and it came up with this:

 

https://www.bitqueues.com/auto-reply-pro-for-gmail-gsuite/ but it's not free.