Hi @John-Phillips217 - good question. I'll focus on Transactional Emails in this response, and then speak to Inquiry Responders in a new thread.
To start, for a high-level overview, we have an article and video that covers how message automation works in your MyVR account.
At a high-level, Transactional Emails are intended to keep your guest automatically notified of the status of her reservation and associated payments so that you don't have to. So we start you out with a predefined set of notifications that we believe give you coverage, but allow you to change:
Whether the message gets sent at all (enabled vs disabled)
Whether the message gets sent automatically or just queued for you to manually send later (auto send)
The subject line, content, and recipients of each Transactional Email (using our standard message templates)
As to when the emails are triggered and sent, generally, immediately upon the defined 'trigger' taking place. For example, if a guest makes a payment, we immediately fire the Reservation Payment email. The main exceptions are the two Reservation Payment Due emails (one for when automatic payment collection is turned on, one for when it is off); those two emails will be queued up to fire the day before the payment is due, and you can see them in your Outbox or in the Timeline > Future view for any specific reservation.
Hope that helps!
(p.s. slightly modified your post's title for future searches)
