New out of office notices in Gmail

April 3, 2020

Last year, Google announced the ability to see when someone is out of office in Gmail, specifically when composing a new email or Hangouts Chat. Now, they’re expanding that functionality to more places in Gmail on the web, like when you’re hovering over someone’s name in your inbox or in the “To” or “From” line in an email.

Screenshot of the new contact info showing out of office notices in Gmail

This feature gives visibility to your time out of office in more places across G Suite, making it clear to senders the appropriate time to message you.

These notices will automatically appear when anyone whose calendar you have access to has an out of office event scheduled. Use the Google Help Center to learn more about disabling the sharing of availability information to other G Suite apps. 

Important: This feature stems from your Google Calendar out of office settings, not the vacation responder in Gmail. As a reminder, only use MCommunity for your out of office notifications and not Gmail’s vacation responder. MCommunity has been specifically designed to work within the U-M computing environment. Using Gmail’s native feature has been known to cause issues with recipients of out of office messages. For more information on how to set your away message in MCommunity, see ITS’s documentation page.

According to Google, this feature is available now in the U-M domain.