The vacation reply said I was gone. I was sitting there waiting for it.
I sent the outside message from Gmail to my Beatport account. The mail host received it and generated the automatic response. Then I did it again with another subject and address.
A real employee out-of-office notice arrived the same day. It was another example of the same feature in normal use.
Vacation replies are small until two automatic systems answer each other, an outside sender never gets the notice, or the original message disappears. I needed the trigger, reply path, text, and delivery to work without creating a loop.
This was one more branch of the same mail setup I had been testing since I joined. IMAP, direct delivery, shared addresses, lists, queues, outside routes, logs, and now the responder.
The subjects were not glamorous. testt. tet. Whatever made the message easy to spot. Beatport sold music around the world, but this part of the company still came down to one ordinary service behaving correctly.
The test was intentionally false. I was not gone.
I was in the office, watching the system say I was away.
I kept sending from outside because an internal test could bypass the same filters or routing a customer used. Gmail gave me a clean public path into Beatport.
The response came back. Then I changed the next address and tried again.
The useful part was that the request started outside Beatport. It crossed the same public route a normal sender would use, reached my work account, and triggered the automatic response back to Gmail.
The notice said I was away. I was still at my desk watching it arrive.