I’m reaching out to see if there’s a way to filter or identify all the contacts who have sent back automatic email replies to our campaigns. We recently discovered that the “No longer work here” responses we’ve been receiving aren’t automatically being added to the bounce list as we initially thought.
Our goal is to identify everyone who has sent an auto-reply (e.g., out of office, no longer with the company, etc.) so we can review them and manually add the appropriate contacts to the bounce list. This would ensure we’re not continuing to send emails to invalid addresses or contacts who are no longer there.
Do you know if there’s an efficient way to filter or pull this information? Additionally, do you have any recommendations for how we should handle this process moving forward to prevent similar issues?
Thank you for your help!
Hi @KDouglas2 ,
Thank you for reaching out! Currently, HubSpot does not have a native feature to automatically filter or identify auto-replies from contacts. However, here are a couple of workarounds that could probably help:
Workaround 1: Custom Property and Automation
- Create a custom property called “Auto-Reply Detected” (checkbox type) to track contacts who send auto-replies.
- Set up rules to filter incoming emails for common phrases like “Out of office”, “Vacation”, or “No longer work here”. When these keywords are detected, update the property to True.
- In the Conversations section, configure automation rules to tag or update the custom property based on these detected keywords.
- Create a static list to include contacts where the “Auto-Reply Detected” property is set to True. This list will help you review contacts who have sent auto-replies.
- Periodically review the static list to identify contacts with invalid email addresses or those who are no longer with the company, and manually add them to the bounce list to prevent future emails.
This would only works once per contact due to HubSpot’s limitation with activity-based triggers (i.e., auto-reply detection rules can only be triggered once per contact).
Workaround 2: Workflow-Based Solution
- Create a workflow that triggers when an auto-reply activity is detected.
- Add these contacts to a list for manual review or exclude them from future marketing emails.
Similar to the first workaround, activity-based triggers in HubSpot allow enrollment only once, meaning repeated auto-replies from the same contact won’t trigger the workflow again.
While these options aren’t fully automated, they provide a structured way to manage auto-replies and maintain accurate email lists.
Let me know if you’d like guidance on implementing these changes! If this helps, feel free to mark it as the solution 
and give it an upvote 
!
So for Workaround 2, if someone goes on there in 2024 saying im on vacation and them again they send an auto reply in 2025 saying no longer here it wont be triggered again? What we were to manually look at all the replies we get and if they were something like a vacation notice we can take them out of the workflow so in the future if they do another one they can be put back in there? Would that work or is it a one and done no matter what?
Hi @KDouglas2,
You can enable re-enrollment triggers to allow contacts to re-enter the workflow for future auto-replies. Alternatively, manually removing them after reviewing “on vacation” replies ensures they can re-trigger the workflow later.
I wanted to jump in here since we’re dealing with the same challenge. Our Marketing team keeps receiving auto-reply emails from contacts who’ve left the prospect company, and we want to automatically update a status field whenever that happens.
On paper, a workflow triggered by key terms sounds like the right solution. But my concern is accuracy: with so much variation in how these auto-replies are worded, I doubt the workflow would catch all of them. If it only catches 20 out of 30, we’d end up with 20 contacts correctly flagged as “no longer with the company” — but no easy way to identify which of the remaining 10 were missed.
That means our marketing person would still have to manually review every auto-reply to figure out which ones the workflow caught and which it didn’t. In practice, that seems like it creates more work rather than less?