I read it as coming from a person who was overly frustrated with their regular OOO being ignored. It’s one of my pet peeves – the OOO clearly says I’m not there and to contact Bob, yet the sender continues to reply, never contacts Bob, then blows up at me when I return that their work is delayed. I would love to be able to send something like this message in the letter but it wouldn’t fly at my office.
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If it’s not that infinite loop of autoreply hell, you get the “I will not be reading or responding to any email sent during this time. Please resend your request after August 1st.” dismissal.
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I do this when I’m on personal vacations. When I’m doing field work for research, I do tend to add a statement that I won’t have access to email/phone because I’m doing field work in X location.
Logging off will happen to every one of us, whether you're on vacation, have a family emergency, or need to attend a work conference. So we're going to put your mind at ease, creating a unique out of office message to greet your clients and take care of them until you return.
Oops, too late! I’m off on holiday right now until the 16th, probably sipping on a margarita while you read this. I’ll reply when I’m back, but if it’s super urgent, contact [email protected]. It wouldn’t be right for this message to go to your boss or a client. If you’re not sure who is going to receive your message, we suggest following a more formal template.
I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but I’m on holiday. I won’t be able to connect with you until [date]. However, there’s good news too: my colleague [Name] will help you with pleasure.
10) I am on vacation from mm/dd to mm/dd. I will allow each sender one email. If you send me multiple emails, I will randomly delete your emails until it is pared down to one. Choose wisely. Please note that you already sent me one email.
I know a lot of people who never vacation for more than a few days because the email backlog becomes incredibly stressful upon their return; this is one way to meaningfully combat that which is somewhat in the employee’s control.
Because I used to get phone calls that defaulted to, “I need the director”, I had my out of office mail set to:
Hi there, Thank you for reaching out! We are currently in the middle of our busy season so our reply may be delayed up to three days. We appreciate your patience while we look into this for you! Thank you.
Co-sign. HATE THAT. We use Outlook and there’s a banner across the top that says AUTOMATIC REPLIES ARE BEING SENT. Just click the button to stop them!
This isn’t about an off-key OOO message, but one where a rogue OOO message drove our department insane for a day and a half.
I am not able to set OOO messages at all. Most of the people who are contacting me do so through custom aliases that then come to our team, who each handles specifics. Even if I’m out someone else is available, but I can’t know who is supposed to handle that specific email to be able to redirect without naming everyone, and then confusing things more when Client A gets the same reply as Client B but one needs to go to teammate C and the other to teammates D & E. Then to make just that bit more complicated, there are the clients who think that going around the system to email the teammates directly at our personal email addresses is better but pitch a hissy when we’re OOO but they didn’t get a notice? I just set rules to forward those.
From March 30th 2018 until April 02nd 2018 our office will be closed due to the holidays. From April 03rd 2018 we are back as usual for you and answer your requests as soon as possible.
On the funnier side, my vacations tend to be trips to either see my favorite band in far flung places or going to conventions for my hobby, so for a while I added a checklist at the end of my OOO that said: