Tutorial: out-of-office reply

This walks through the Out of Office quick-start template: it replies automatically when a message arrives outside business hours, and stays quiet the rest of the time.

Go to Automations and open the Out of Office template (or click Create Automation and build it from scratch with the trigger and steps below).
Check the trigger. It's New Message Received — any incoming message, with no keyword or condition attached to the trigger itself. The time check happens in the first step instead.

The trigger fires on every inbound message; the time window is checked by the condition step below it.
Open the Condition (If/Else) step. Its Subject is Time of day and its Operand is 18:00-09:00 — meaning "6 PM through 9 AM."

The operand format is HH:mm-HH:mm. A range where the start is later than the end — like 18:00-09:00 — wraps past midnight.

This checks the server's clock, not the customer's
Time of day conditions compare against the server's local time when the message arrives — not the customer's time zone, and not yours if you're in a different one. If your team and your customers aren't in the same time zone as your Relay deployment, adjust the operand accordingly. See Conditions and waits for the exact comparison logic.
Every step after a condition lives in its Yes or No branch. The template puts one Send Message step in the Yes branch — it only runs when the message arrived inside the 18:00–09:00 window. Open it and edit the reply text to match your hours:

Only the Yes branch has a step, so nothing sends during business hours.
Leave the No branch empty — that's what makes the automation silent during business hours. Add steps there only if you want something to happen on every message that arrives inside the window too.
When you're happy with the wording and the hours, click Save Draft, then review the automation once more and flip its Active switch from the list page.