Autoresponders

When somebody writes to a team address, they often can't tell whether anyone has seen it. An autoresponder answers that straight away: it sends an automatic reply saying their message arrived, and roughly when a person will get back to them.

Admins set up autoresponders on Settings → Autoresponders. Every team has a default autoresponder, on every plan. It starts switched off.

Turning on the default autoresponder

Go to Settings → Autoresponders, and click Default autoresponder.
Write your reply in Message. You can put pictures in it by dragging or pasting them in, as you would in a reply.
Check the two options under the message (they're explained below), then press Save.
At the top of the page, click the switch so that it reads This autoresponder is on.

From then on, it answers mail as it arrives.

The two options

Both of these are ticked to begin with.

Only reply to the first message in a conversation. The autoresponder answers the message that starts a conversation, and nothing after it. If you untick this, it answers every message the sender writes, so one customer can end up with a stream of identical replies. Leave it ticked unless you have a good reason.
Mark the conversation as read after replying. Once the automatic reply has gone, the conversation is marked read for everyone. Untick this if you'd like it to stay unread, so that it still looks new to the team.

What the sender receives

The reply comes from the team address they wrote to, under that address's name (or the team's name, if the address has none). Its subject is "Re:" followed by the subject of their message.

In Jelly, the reply appears in the conversation as a sent message with an Automatic badge, and the conversation's activity notes that the autoresponder was sent.

Writing a good automatic reply

Keep it short.
Say that the message arrived, and roughly when a person will reply.
Don't pretend to be a person.
Don't promise a reply time the team can't keep. "Within an hour" when the truth is "next working day" is worse than no reply.

When it doesn't reply

An autoresponder is careful about who it answers, so that it doesn't get into a conversation with another machine. It never replies to:

automatic mail, such as noreply@ addresses, bounces and other people's autoresponders;
mailing lists, unless it's the team's own list;
your own team: any of the team's addresses, or anyone on the team;
blocked contacts, or anything in Spam;
old mail brought in by an import, or when you first connect an account.

A message gets one automatic reply at most.

The default and the others

One reply doesn't always suit all your mail. You might want a different one for billing@, or for anything with "urgent" in the subject. For that, you add another autoresponder and make a rule that sends it. The default answers mail on its own. Any other autoresponder is only ever sent by a rule.

On Settings → Autoresponders, press Add an autoresponder.
Give it a Name. This is what you'll pick it by in a rule.
Write the Message, set the options, and press Add autoresponder.
Make or edit a rule, and choose this autoresponder in its Send the autoresponder action.

Until a rule sends it, an autoresponder does nothing. The list shows how many rules send each one, for example Sent by 1 rule or No rule sends it yet.

To swap which one is the default, open another autoresponder's ⋯ menu, or its page, and choose Make it the default. The old default keeps its message and becomes one a rule can send.

Answering only some mail

You may want an automatic reply on some mail and none on the rest. To do that:

Switch the default autoresponder off.
Add an autoresponder for the mail you want answered.
Add a rule that sends it, for example when Received at is support@.

Mail to support@ then gets the automatic reply. Mail to any other address, such as sales@, gets none.

Which one answers

When a rule sends an autoresponder for a message, that one answers instead of the default. If no rule does, the default answers, as long as it's switched on and the message is one it replies to.

When several matching rules each send one, Jelly takes them in the order the rules were made and sends the first that can answer. An autoresponder set to reply only to first messages steps aside on a later message, and Jelly tries the next rule's, and finally the default. You can't reorder rules, so to change which reply goes out, change which autoresponder each rule sends.

Turning off or deleting an autoresponder

To stop an autoresponder for a while, switch it off: its ⋯ menu has Turn off, and its page has a switch. You can switch the default off, but you can't delete it.

To delete any other autoresponder, choose Delete autoresponder… from its menu, then Delete the autoresponder. The replies it has already sent stay in their conversations.

Before you switch off or delete an autoresponder that rules send, change each of those rules to send a different one, or — no autoresponder —. Otherwise, as the warning above explains, mail those rules match gets no automatic reply at all.

Advanced: exactly what it won't answer

For anyone who needs the precise list, the autoresponder doesn't reply to a message:

with an Auto-Submitted header set to anything except no, or Precedence: auto_reply;
with no From address;
from mailer-daemon, postmaster, noreply, no-reply, donotreply, bounce or bounces, or any address starting bounce or containing mailer-daemon;
with a List-Id, List-Unsubscribe, List-Owner or X-Mailing-List header, or a Precedence of bulk, junk or list, unless the list is the team's own (a Google Group, for example);
that is Google's "confirm forwarding" message;
in a conversation in Spam, or from a blocked contact;
from the sign-in address of anyone on the team, or any of the team's addresses;
that arrived at no team address, or at one that is Unverified.

Each automatic reply carries Auto-Submitted: auto-replied, so other systems know not to answer it.