Gmail and Hangouts Chat get out of office notification

Gmail and Hangouts Chat have been updated to include out of office (OOO) notification. A notice of that OOO status will appear in Gmail and Hangouts Chat when people try to contact you. In Gmail, a banner about the recipient being out of office will show up and when they’ll be back in the email compose window.

In Hangouts Chat, you’ll also see a small notification in the chat compose window alerting you that the person you’re trying to message is out of office.

With this launch, before people even hit “send,” your time out of office is visible in more places across G Suite, meaning you get more uninterrupted time away. As a sender, you’ll also have more confidence that you’re messaging people at an appropriate time.

If you’d like to disable sharing of availability information to other G Suite apps, you can do so in Calendar under Calendar settings > Access permissions. Just deselect “Show calendar info in other Google apps, limited by access permissions.”