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Use the workspace Auto-responder to send a fixed acknowledgement when an eligible customer email arrives outside your business hours. It is separate from Evelin’s AI replies, saved reply templates, and your personal signature. You need the workspace Owner or Admin role to change these settings. Set up and verify your support email first; see Set up your support email.

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Set business hours first

  1. Open Settings → General in the correct workspace.
  2. Find Business Hours and select Edit.
  3. Choose the workspace’s Timezone.
  4. Under Weekly Schedule, enable your working days and set each day’s opening and closing times. Use a closing time later than the opening time on the same day.
  5. Select Save Schedule.
The schedule uses the timezone selected in this form, not necessarily the timezone on your device. Opening the editor may suggest Monday–Friday, 09:00–17:00 when no schedule has been saved; that suggestion is not active until you save it. Important: an absent or empty schedule means 24/7 availability. Turning off every day does not mean “always closed”—it leaves no out-of-hours period for the auto-responder. Keep at least one valid working-day time window if you want replies outside scheduled hours. These are shared workspace business hours, also used by business-hours-only SLA calculations. Review the impact on your team before changing them solely to test an automatic reply.

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Enable the auto-responder

  1. In Settings → General, find Auto-responder and select Edit.
  2. Select Enable auto-responder.
  3. Enter the Message customers should receive.
  4. Choose a Cooldown: 1, 2, 4, 8, 24, or 48 hours.
  5. Select Save and confirm that the card shows Enabled and the selected cooldown.
Use a short message that acknowledges receipt and sets realistic expectations. For example:
Thanks for contacting us. Your message has reached our support team. We are currently outside our business hours and will reply when the team is back.
Adjust that wording to match your actual service hours. The responder sends the saved message; do not assume it translates the text, inserts a personal signature, or fills template variables automatically. Include any essential sign-off directly in the message.

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Understand when a reply is sent

An automatic reply is eligible when a newly received email is successfully added to the workspace, the responder is enabled with a non-empty message, and the current time is outside the saved schedule. An email added to an existing conversation can also qualify; it is not restricted to the first message in a new conversation. The cooldown is per customer within the workspace, not per conversation. A customer sending several messages—or writing in another conversation—within that window should not receive an acknowledgement for each message. Four hours is the fallback cooldown when no positive duration is configured. Provider retries of an already ingested message do not trigger another auto-response. Messages rejected by inbound filtering do not reach this step either. The feature described here is the inbound-email workflow; it is not a promise of matching behavior for Live Chat or other channels. The acknowledgement is saved as an automatic reply and queued for outbound delivery. Seeing it in the conversation does not, by itself, prove it reached the customer’s mailbox. Delivery can still fail after the reply is created.

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Verify with a controlled email

After saving, test from a separate mailbox you control during an actual out-of-hours period. Check that the email arrives in Protodesk and that the acknowledgement arrives back in that mailbox. Avoid changing your production schedule just for a quick test, because that also affects the team’s shared hours. Allow for the cooldown when repeating the test. A second message from the same customer may correctly receive no second acknowledgement. A fictional test thread or an email setup probe is not proof that this outbound workflow is working. For delivery checks, see Test and troubleshoot email delivery.

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Turn it off

Open Auto-responder → Edit, clear Enable auto-responder, and select Save. Confirm that the card shows Disabled. This stops future eligibility; it does not recall emails already delivered or cancel replies already queued.

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Troubleshoot a missing acknowledgement

  • Business hours are unset: save a non-empty schedule. Default 24/7 means there is no closed period.
  • It is still inside business hours: check the configured timezone and working-day window.
  • The customer recently received an acknowledgement: wait for the configured cooldown before retesting.
  • The message is blank or the responder is disabled: review the saved Auto-responder settings.
  • The inbound email never appeared: resolve forwarding, routing, or filtering first.
  • The automatic reply appears but was not received: check outbound delivery rather than repeatedly toggling the responder. The inbound email can still be accepted even if the acknowledgement fails.
When contacting support, provide the conversation reference, approximate test time and timezone, and the visible error or delivery state. Do not send passwords or API keys.