Gmail vacation responder and Google Calendar from Jira absences

The problem

In Google Workspace, the vacation responder and the calendar are separate places to remember. Approvals happen in Jira, but nobody updates Gmail, and colleagues book meetings with people who are on holiday.

Step by step

1. Authorise. A Google Workspace administrator creates a service account and authorises its client id for domain-wide delegation with gmail.send, gmail.settings.basic and calendar.events — or authorises ours.
2. Connect. The Jira administrator pastes the service-account key in Mail & calendar, enters a sender mailbox and runs the connection test.
3. Link. People link their Google mailbox with a code sent to it.
4. Approve. Approved absences schedule the vacation responder and add a calendar entry; cancelled ones remove them again. E-mails to approvers, requester and substitute go out from the sender mailbox.
5. Import, if wanted. Google Calendar entries of the type “Out of office” and scheduled vacation responders can come back into Jira as absences.

What to watch out for

Of the service-account key only the client e-mail, the private key and the client id are kept, in Forge secret storage. Gmail has no “colleagues only” level for external senders; the closest match is “only people in my domain”. Gmail keeps one vacation responder per mailbox.