Note: While you could test your out-of-office message, you can also see it’s working because Gmail conveniently overlays a yellow bar at the top of your inbox reminding you that your autoresponder is on, along with options to “End now” or adjust your settings.
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to return your message. As it’s the holiday season, I’m currently away from the office. When I return, I’ll give your email a good solid read and find that your request is exactly what I needed after all! But until then, I’m going to keep it in the inbox so it doesn’t get damaged and revisit it after the holidays are over.
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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).
You’ve reached Michael Abioye’s inbox. This is a general notice informing you of Michael Abioye’s absence until January 2nd, 20XX. He is currently partaking in the traditions of a certain holiday, which may or may not be denominational or non-denominational. Example Company is in no way endorsing or not endorsing said holiday, nor encouraging or discouraging employees of all demographics to engage in celebratory activities. Thank you for your consideration during this festive or not-festive time.
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But for employees at Daimler things are a little different. Email these people while they are on holiday and you will get a message like this:
If your phone system allows employees to receive external calls at their desks, instruct them to record a "closed for the holidays" message or "out of office" voicemail greeting that gives callers essential details about the closing.
Hey, why are you being so sneaky about where you've disappeared to? If you're not on vacation and your out of office is for a work trip, well darn it, work that! [Editor's note: Pun totally intended.]
The worst one I ever received was from a coworker (senior to me, but not my manager) many years ago. I’ll paraphrase it as my memory isn’t great:
I get really annoyed at people that don’t have put up OOO messages and I am left wondering if they are out or just ignoring me. I collaborated with a woman who was out frequently but never put an OOO. She also got very prickly if she felt you were going around her. So anytime we didn’t get a response from her, we had to go through this guessing game of “do we wait, do we talk to someone else, how important is our request.” I was glad when she moved on.
What I really hate is when I get back to the office and haven’t taken the 10 minutes to go into our labyrinthian voicemail system, remove the out of office voicemail message, and record a new one (without being interrupted, stuttering, etc.) and some SUPER DUPER HELPFUL person feels the need to InFoRm mE in their voicemail message that I sTiLl HaVe My OuT oF oFfIcE mEsSaGe Up!!!1!
I don’t usually read the messages anyway, I just take it as information that the recipient won’t see my message right away. If that will cause issues, I’ll contact someone else.
I mean, sometimes I put up an OOO because I’m on vacation and not checking email. Sometimes I put one up because I’m travelling for work and will only have sporadic access to my laptop, but might get to check once or twice a day. In my role, it’s important to make that distinction. Maybe it’s not so important for other people.
I only set my out of office if I’m going to be gone for more than one full day. Like, right now I don’t bother if I’m going to be out for one day, because in general the people who email me either know I’m out for a day or are unfazed by waiting 24 hours for a response. The last time I went out of office for a week, I came back to about 65 emails, 9 of which would have actually required my attention when I weeded through them. If I got a higher email volume, I’d do for a single day though.
Oh my gaaaaawwwwdddd my mother used to do this. Like, her work voicemail was “Hello, you have reached Lizy’s Mother, Job Title at Company Name. Today is Thursday, June 3. I am in the office today, but away from my desk at the moment. If you’ll leave a message with your name, phone number, and reason for your call, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
I personally like it. Of course, the emails that I’ve seen still say what to do if the matter is urgent and needs to be handled now — but as a person who gets 100+ emails a day, whether I tell you I’m deleting all of them when I get back or not — if it is in the thousands of emails that might accumulate in the time I am off, I’m not going to see it or respond. Better that I tell you now that you are going to have to resend the email after I return (or get my backup to handle it now) than you sit around waiting for a response that is never going to come. It is actually pretty common in my industry for any absence two weeks or more.
So many people emailed Ryan that Aviation Gin's servers crashed. Here's his July 2018 out of office message: