Why Skipping Vacationing Contacts Boosts Email Deliverability

1. Preserve engagement signals

Mailbox providers track the percentage of recipients who open or click. Messages
sent to people who are out of office deliver zero engagement, dragging your
averages down and signalling that your content isn’t relevant—one of the fastest
routes to the spam folder.

2. Prevent soft bounces from snowballing

Every outofoffice (OOO) autoreply is recorded as a soft bounce. When the same
address keeps softbouncing campaign after campaign, many ISPs eventually treat it
like a hard bounce and start throttling—or outright blocking—mail from your domain.

3. Protect sender reputation and IP score

Low bounce rates and steady engagement tell filtering algorithms you’re a
trustworthy sender. By holding back emails during a recipient’s vacation window, you
keep your reputation clean and improve inbox placement for all contacts.

4. Cut waste and lower ESP bills

Pausing messages to temporary OOO addresses trims nonperforming volume.
Staying under typical bouncerate thresholds (< 2 %) helps you avoid deliverability
penalties and unnecessary sending costs. The Autoreply Processing Calculator
quantifies this impact, showing that filtering out people on leave typically reduces
planned sends by about 10 %.

5. Keep offers in front of real decisionmakers

OOO replies often contain an alternate contact who is reading email. Parsing those
replies lets you reroute newsletters, promotions, or account notifications to someone
who can open, click, and buy right now—while the original contact is away.
Bottom line: skipping vacationing contacts isn’t just polite; it’s a deliverability best
practice that safeguards your sender reputation, reduces costs, and ensures your
campaigns reach people who can act on them.