Scheduling Gmail Vacation Responses

August 19, 2020 2:01 PM

Our labor union is looking for ways that our members can very easily set out of office / "vacation" responses in Gmail during non-work hours (we are in contract negotiations and working to book). I know this can be done manually each day by turning on an autoresponse at the end of the day. However, I'm looking for a pretty easy way for this to happen automatically, between, say, 5pm and 8am.

Is this possible via any extensions, addons, etc?

posted by rossination to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

It was possible as of a couple of years ago, according to this question at StackExchange. Each user would need to set up the script for their account. You'd want to edit that script a bit for the days and times you want.

The Gmail API also has a REST call for toggling the vacation response. It's authorized on a per-user basis, though, so there'd need to be a little setup to make it work (namely, getting the users's ID , an API key, and a unique authorization token). That sounds like black magic, but from a programming perspective it's pretty standard stuff.
posted by jquinby at 2:36 PM on August 19, 2020

Pretty sure MS Flow now known as Power Automate could do that pretty easily.
posted by museum of fire ants at 6:44 PM on August 19, 2020

Right. The logic (in a different workflow app) is visible here: https://xfanatical.com/blog/automated-recurring-out-of-office-reply-in-gmail/ - basically automate the turning on and off of the vacation responder. I quite like MS Flow as a solution, but Zapier, IFTTT, etc. should all be able to talk to the API, and I think you should be able to share the solution.

Here's another solution: https://memberfix.rocks/gmail-office-hours/

I'm surprised there isn't a Marketplace add-on that does this. There may be one and I just haven't found the right terms.
posted by idb at 8:52 AM on August 21, 2020

I had a colleague ask me the exact same question, and Google brought me here.

Using some of the links above, I was able to cobble together a solution using the Google Script function. I tested it on an educational and enterprise domain, and it worked fine. You can copy-paste the script from here: https://fortmactech.com/automate-gmail-vacation

I did a little video walk-through as well. Should take a few minutes to set up, but then it seems to work just fine.
posted by MiG at 10:01 AM on August 23, 2020