I can’t remember if this was just an outgoing voice message before routing you to an individual, or for a voicemail, but I remember a fun December phone message from a small company (I think an insurance agency) sung to the tune of a Christmas carol–something like Jingle Bells. The content was something like: you’ve reached our office during this holiday season, hope your holidays are happy, please 1) leave a message or 2) press X for who you want. Other than the tune, it wasn’t overly holiday-centric (for those who don’t celebrate the holidays) and it was cute.
I am in London May 29th - June 4th, so email replies may be tardy due to the curvature of the earth and the sun… and you know… science and stuff.
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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.
This information will help the person reaching out to you gauge whether their message can wait for your response or if they need to contact someone else instead.
Set a minimum delay for auto-responses. For example, if you set a minimum delay of 1, the eDesk will send the OOO template 1 minute after receiving the customer’s message. If you don’t set a minimum delay, eDesk will auto-respond immediately upon receipt of a message.
10. Basic Out of the Office Autoresponder Example. [Greeting] Thanks for your email. I will be out of the office on vacation until (Date). If you need more immediate assistance, then you can reach out to
Given free rein, I’d absolutely love to tell people that needing me to show them how to do X in Excel is actually not a vacation-interrupting emergency and there are tons of free videos that would explain that, if they did not want to contact the actual departments who handle tech support and training. Or that this project they’ve known about for a month but decided to keep under their hat until it became an emergency is something they’ll need to resolve themselves. But that would not fly at all.
Website: https://www.exclaimer.com/email-signature-handbook/10142-out-of-office-templates
Website: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-to-close-the-office-for-the-holidays-2533737
While you’re writing and activating your out-of-office message, sidestep these pitfalls:
An ex-Apple PR, Karen's career highlights include interviewing Apple's Steve Wozniak and discussing Steve Jobs’ legacy on the BBC. Her focus is Mac, but she lives and breathes Apple. Recent stories by Karen Haslam: How to delete cache on a Mac How to update iOS on your iPhone Apple releases important security updates to stop spyware About Macworld Contact Site Map Information for Advertisers Licensing & Eprints Privacy Policy Terms & Conditions Cookies Follow Macworld on Twitter Follow Macworld on Facebook
That’s exactly how I set up mine, except that ordinarily I’d have several options, like: “If you need help with X, call A. For help with Y, call B. For help with Z, call C. For anything else, call my manager at extension 000.
I’ve honestly considered changing my OOO message/voicemail to “You’ve reached Lisa. I’m overwhelmed right now, so I’ll get back to you eventually.”
Yes! I HATE the voicemails that are like “can you give me a call back?” Like… give me some context so you can end up on my to-do list in the right place. People who leave these voicemails automatically go on the bottom.
Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa. That’s where I’ll be for the next couple of days, giving my last out of town keynote of the year (yay!). I don’t know if there really is a Field of Dreams, but I’ll be in search of it in between checking emails and getting back to you as quickly as I can. If you need something while I’m stuck in a corn field, you can send a note to my assistant and she will be happy to help you.
I guess it’s relatively minor, but I once emailed a local government official with a question about building permits (just as a citizen, not work-related) at about 10am on a Monday and got an out-of-office reply stating she’d be back “Monday” with no date. So I had no idea whether she was already back and hadn’t turned off the message yet, in which case, not urgent, I’ll wait, or was out for a week, in which case, I’d like to ask someone else. Not a big inconvenience, but it was so illogical not to give a date that it really drove me crazy
What was weirder is that it took a couple weeks after covid hit for her to turn the message off – which meant that when the entire company was wfh, we would still get an fyi message from her that she was also working from home.