“For the Symantec office, I send holiday wishes for the employees’ holiday out of office. I wish all the employees have lots of fun and adventure during the recreational holiday period. Have a happy holiday.”
Hoo boy, have I got some PTSD from Old Job about out of office autoreplies. Exboss was such a stickler for them and actually enforced her expectations as official policy. Meaning if you didn’t do it to her exact specs, she’d call you back to the office to do it (which no one did) and read you the riot act afterwards while threatening to write you up for insubordination. She demanded them any time that we were away from our desk for longer than 30 minutes and for anything other than a meeting. So training in the conference room down the hall, a work lunch with teammates, leaving an hour early for an appointment, arriving late for an appointment, even working from home, all required OOO alerts.

“Many people reveal details about their personal lives in an OOO — like where and when they’re traveling,” Tim Sadler, CEO of Tessian, explains in an email interview. “Whether done on social media or in an auto-reply message on email, this arms hackers with the information they need to either craft a convincing email targeted at the OOO employee or impersonate the person who is on vacation and target one of their colleagues.”
“For example, if a hacker knows that the chief financial officer of a company is OOO, thanks to the information in the auto-reply message, an attacker could impersonate the CFO on email and target another individual in the company’s finance team asking them to make a payment or update bank details for them while they are offline,” says Sadler.