Contacts and replies
In short
Why did Reply count an out-of-office as a reply?
Reply classifies every incoming message as a bounce, an out-of-office, an automatic reply, or a real reply, and the classification decides what happens to the contact. Out-of-office pauses the contact and resumes it later; an automatic reply finishes it. Neither is counted as a reply in your statistics.
Quick fix
- Open the contact and check its status. Out Of Office means paused and due to resume on its own; Finished with an Auto reply sub-status means an auto-responder ended it.
- If the classification is wrong, set the status back yourself: People tab → select the contact → Change Status → Active.
- To find every contact this happened to, filter the People tab by the Auto-replied status.
- Check your reply statistics – automatic messages are excluded from them, so the numbers should be unaffected.
Didn't work? Contact Reply support; the team can check your account directly.
Symptom
A contact stopped mid-sequence, or finished, after an automatic message arrived. Nobody actually answered. The status may be Out Of Office, or Finished with an Auto reply sub-status, and follow-ups have stopped going out.
How Reply classifies an incoming message
Messages are tested in a fixed order, and the first match decides. This order is why a message that looks like two things at once lands where it does.
| Order | Test | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The message is a bounce, including a provider's sending-limit warning | Bounce |
| 2 | The subject says out of office | Out of office |
| 3 | The subject looks automatic and the body mentions being out of office | Out of office |
| 4 | The subject looks automatic and the body does not mention being out of office | Automatic reply |
| 5 | The subject is ordinary but the body mentions being out of office | Out of office |
| 6 | The message carries automatic-responder headers | Automatic reply |
| – | Nothing matched | Reply |
Two details explain most surprises. Out of office wins over automatic reply whenever both look true (rule 3) so a vacation responder is treated as a pause, not an ending. And from rule 4 onward only the beginning of the message body is scanned for out-of-office wording, so a long human reply that mentions a holiday near the end is still treated as a real reply.
What each classification does
| Classification | Contact status | Sequence | Counted as a reply? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Out of office | Out Of Office | Paused, then resumed automatically | No |
| Automatic reply | Finished, sub-status Auto reply | Ended | No |
| Bounce | Finished | Ended | No |
| Reply | Depends on the sequence's reply handling – see Why is a contact still active after replying? | Ends or continues | Yes |
Bounces, out-of-office messages and automatic replies ignore the sequence's reply-handling setting. Setting a sequence to continue sending after a reply does not keep a contact running past a bounce or an auto-responder.
Diagnostic checklist
- Open the message itself. Read its subject and its opening lines, then compare them with the order above; that is exactly what Reply did.
- Check the contact's status and sub-status. Auto reply as a sub-status is the signal that rule 4 or 6 matched.
- Check the statistics before assuming they are wrong. Automatic messages are excluded from contacted and replied figures, so a status change does not move your reply rate.
- If the same sender does this repeatedly, look at the wording their responder uses; it is what the classification reads.
Resolution
The message was a real reply, misclassified
Set the status back manually: People tab → select the contact → Change Status → Active, then answer from the thread. The contact resumes from where it stopped.
It was an out-of-office and you want the contact to continue now
Out-of-office contacts resume on their own after the period Reply recorded. To bring one back earlier, set its status to Active.
You want to see automatic messages in the inbox
By default they are not shown. Change the handling in Settings → Emails → Email Safety from Do not display to Display or Display & mark as read.
You want to review them in bulk
Filter the People tab by the Auto-replied status. Reply has no separate inbox label for automatic messages; if you want one, create a custom inbox category and assign it to those threads.
Verification
Re-open the contact: the status is the one you set, and the next step is scheduled again. For a whole batch, re-filter by Auto-replied and confirm the list is empty of contacts you have corrected.
Prevention
- Expect out-of-office messages during holiday periods and treat the pause as intended behaviour: those contacts come back on their own.
- Before reacting to a batch of finished contacts, check whether the reply rate actually moved. Usually it has not.
- Where a contact's responder is repeatedly misread, mark them manually rather than changing the sequence's reply handling, which affects everyone.
FAQ
Does an out-of-office end the sequence for that contact?
No. It pauses the contact and Reply resumes them automatically. Only automatic replies and bounces finish a contact.
Do automatic replies count towards my reply rate?
No. Bounces, out-of-office messages and automatic replies are all excluded from contacted and replied figures, and reported separately.
Can I stop Reply from finishing a contact on an automatic reply?
Not through the sequence's reply-handling setting: automatic replies and bounces bypass it. Set the contact back to Active manually instead.
Still stuck? Contact Reply support
If these steps didn't solve the problem, the Reply support team can look at your account directly. Open the Reply Help Center and send the team a message.
To get an answer faster, include:
- the subject line and the first few lines of the message that was misclassified
- the contact's current status and sub-status
- which sequence the contact is in, and roughly when the message arrived
- your timezone
Don't send passwords, API keys, or access tokens.
Related
- Why was a reply not detected? – the opposite problem
- Why is a contact still active after replying?
- Statuses – every contact status and sub-status
- Process replies
Build with Reply
- Webhooks: Webhook events – an automatic reply raises its own event, separate from a reply
- MCP: docs.reply.io/mcp – review and correct contact statuses from an assistant