Timezone Support and Grace Period
We have been receiving reports from users outside of Central European Time that AutoOOO would sometimes activate a day too early, or fail to activate at all on the right day. The culprit turned out to be a timezone issue in how the add-on was looking up calendar events: it was using the script’s own timezone to determine what “today” is, rather than the user’s. For someone in Tokyo or São Paulo, that is quite a few hours off. This is now fixed: AutoOOO looks up events using plain UTC timestamps, so it no longer matters where the script happens to run.
Grace period
While fixing the above, we also shipped a feature that several users have asked for: a configurable grace period. The idea is simple — activate the autoresponder a few hours before the OOO event starts, and keep it on for a few hours after it ends.
A concrete example: say you mark Friday as OOO in your calendar, but you plan to wrap up and close the laptop at 18:00 on Thursday. Without a grace period, anyone who emails you at 19:00 on Thursday will not get an automatic reply. With a 6-hour grace period, AutoOOO activates at 18:00 the day before — right when you step away — and stays on until 06:00 on Saturday, covering the tail end of any Friday-night replies.
The grace period can be configured in the AutoOOO settings card:
- Off — default behaviour, no change from before
- 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours
The setting is labelled Early activation / late deactivation in the settings panel.
Active until
The status card already showed an Active until date when the autoresponder was on. It now shows the time as well, and it accounts for the grace period — so if your OOO ends on Friday at midnight and you have a 6-hour grace period configured, the card will correctly show Saturday 06:00 rather than Friday 00:00.
Both changes are live now. Enjoy!