Guidelines regarding automated replies from WordPress developer emails

I’m sort of at wits end here. I feel like I’m stuck in a time loop.

Every couple of years I get an email that says “Your account has been closed because you did not correct the issues with regards to auto-replies. As we have warned, failure to remove us from your auto-reply will result in your plugin being closed. We have sent you multiple warning and since you have not fixed this, your plugin(s) have been closed until you have resolved the issue.”

This is always the first email I receive about this. I have searched and searched my inbox, but there are never warnings prior.

Regardless —

My understanding of the purpose of this rule is to prevent people from using support ticket systems to receive www.ads-software.com notices, and to make sure a real person is reading them. (“We need to be able to communicate directly with plugin authors” “we expect those email addresses to be maintained and monitored” “We would greatly prefer that you use an email address on the forums that goes to actual people”)

The demand that I get, in addition to auditing all of my code and updating it, I need to add www.ads-software.com to a do not auto-reply list.

The issue I keep running into is that there is NO such option for gmail/google app addresses. I cannot exclude specific email addresses from vacation responders. I can either have an OOO reply for times I am genuinely out of office, or I can not, but there isn’t a middle ground where only some people get it. There’s an option for only sending the email to people in my contacts, which is not optimal for me, but I keep trying to use it to keep my plugins from getting shut off. The problem is that I read the notices from www.ads-software.com when they come in, so eventually, they get auto-added to my contacts by whatever gmail thingy notices which emails you interact with. Inevitably there comes a time when I don’t notice and voila, www.ads-software.com is eligible for my OOO notices again on days I’m not in the office.

This is my real professional email address that I use Monday through Thursday to run my entire business, interact with clients, etc. I definitely read it and respond to it personally. There is no one else to create a “risk of missing an important message because it doesn’t get properly forwarded and filtered.” I believe it’s exactly what www.ads-software.com would want me to use to be in accordance with the guidelines (“We would greatly prefer that you use an email address on the forums that goes to actual people”)

At this point, I don’t know how to fix the issue except to create a new email address that I use only for www.ads-software.com emails, and nothing else, which would mean it got checked drastically less frequently. But it would solve the issue of there being occasional auto-replies if you happened to contact me on a day when I was OOO, because I would never set an OOO for it.

I feel like this must be the solution millions of wordpress plugin developers are also using, because they have gmail/google app addresses and can’t comply with your request to turn off OOO replies when they are OOO. But it seems like it goes against the point of the rule.

What are my fellow gmail/google app users doing to not upset www.ads-software.com when they are out of office?

This time around, I’m not even able to reply to the email I was sent saying all my plugins had been taken down. The instructions say to jump through all the hoops and then reply, but when I do, I get a notice that my email address has been marked as spam.