I hate the overshare. It drives me nuts. I’ve seen a lot lately that say essentially “After this crazy year I’m spending some much needed quality family time with Jane and the kids doing abc.” yada yada yada. It seems like overkill and way too familiar. You’re spending time with your family-that’s not noteworthy. Just say I’m out this date though this date. Contact person if you have something urgent.
When one of my colleagues is out of the office, he doesn’t mess around. In fact, he’s turned his auto-responses into a running series of commentary from fictional cartoon character Troy McClure.
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We are having a temporary office move soon, and our head of facilities was delighted he didn’t need to find data ports for the phones as well as the PCs ;)
It's December 1st in the North East and businesses are turning their attentions to Christmas...
As CEO of a company, it is customary to send out organization-wide holiday wishes to all employees. If you are feeling stumped on what to say, check out these warm holiday greetings that you can send to your team.
Click the Out Of Office tab, and in the Date & Time Conditions - One-off section, click + Add date range. Set a date range by clicking the date fields and then selecting a start and end date from the calendars. Set a start/finish time for the dates by clicking the time fields and then dragging the sliders horizontally to select the Hour and Minute. If you want your autoresponse to look like a human response, you can tell eDesk to delay sending this template for x minutes. Pro-tip: You can use this to prevent Amazon from detecting your message as an auto-response. Set Frequency if you want to prevent eDesk from auto-responding with the same template to every message about the same ticket. For OOO templates, it is common practice to select Autoreply every single incoming message but you can also select a frequency, for example, once every 6 hours. If you want to tell eDesk NOT to auto-respond with this template to messages from certain email addresses, enter them into the Exclude field, for example, [email protected], [email protected]. You can also exclude all email addresses from a certain domain by entering *@domain.com, for example, *@xsellco.com Tick this if you want to include the signature for the channel in the template.
1. Out of Office and Limited Access to Email Example. [Greeting] Thank you for your email message. I am going to be out of the office and will be back at (Date of Your Return).
Happy holidays! I am currently out of the office, with no email access. I’ll be returning on (insert date) and will get back to you as soon as I can. Happy holidays!
I don’t include this much detail on my OOO, but I do include if I am out of the office for religious observance, because I don’t use electronics on my holidays and want people to know that I really won’t get their message until the holiday is over. (Unlike the norm in my workplace that otherwise senior people are checking email even if we’re sick or on vacation. I know, I know.)
Hi Steve, thanks for your article. My issue is same as Pam Lamkin, above. In order to use your phone you must turn off “Driving” mode, and then any messages that come in will not get the auto reply as long as you are on your phone, and until you reinstate the driving mode. Any thoughts?
There's a term that we like to use around here called "snowbirds," which is used to describe those who once resided in the northern part of the U.S., only to flee to warmer parts of the country during the winter.
My boss requires us to put a nightly OOO message up, and I HATE it. I pushed back on it for months at first, because people know and understand that the reason no one is responding at 8pm is because the business is closed (or at least, they should understand that…). It wasn’t worth the fight, my boss thinks it’s so important, so I caved and just turn on the message every night. I think it makes us look immature and like we don’t understand business norms, but it’s not the hill I’m willing to die on.
Yes! I once went through a chain of 4 people’s OOO and was finally directed back to the first person. It was our benefits broker and you can bet that was the year we decided maybe we should entertain other options before renewing our contract.
I’ll be sure to reply to your message when I wade through my inbox upon my return. If your message is urgent and requires immediate attention, please send an email to [contact name] at [contact email].
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I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought it was funny and not annoying! I’m with Alison that it’s probably just a little wordy, but there’s no problem with the humor.
Mine says something along the lines of “I’m currently away from my desk, and will be back online on Monday, 7 July…” and (if it’s a longer period and not just the next working day) perhaps also something like “If your enquiry is urgent, please resend to…” so someone else can deal with it.