There’s nothing worse than dreading a return from being away from the desk. After all, you’re likely to have an overflowing email inbox left untended while you were on vacation. Sending out this one email before you go anywhere for an extended period of time will help lessen that feeling.
I am on emergency leave for today with no access to emails and phone calls. Hence, kindly expect a delayed response. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
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An away message will generally be a 160-character auto-reply message that can be turned on or off as needed.
While it’s common sense, always discuss and confirm the hand-over with your alternate. Ensure they are well-equipped to properly handle the request while you’re away. You want to be able to properly relax with your egg-nog knowing your urgent emails are in good hands.
The one from “Central Intelligence” with the Rock that I love is is (paraphrasing) :
I am currently out of the office and will not have access to email. Please contact Elena Prince at [email protected] in my absence.
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Apparently it’s a thing where people say in their out of office that they do not intend to read any emails that came in when they were out and your email will be deleted. If you still need assistance you need to resend your email after the person’s return date. While I get it, I’ve been in those positions where you get over 100 emails a day and if you are going to be out and unplugged for a week or more, trying to wade through all the junk and find the stuff that actually needs your attention, I do find this…rude? I don’t know the word I would use, but I have a negative reaction to it.
If you work in an international setting, you should eventually prepare an out-of-office message in English to notify people of your absence and tell the recipient who to contact in case they need an immediate response.
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.
This is one reason I rarely give a contact person. My company is terrible at communication, and not only could you easily be sent on a OOO chain, you could also be emailing someone who is out who didn’t even use OOO.
I used to hire a lot (hundreds) of freelance writers who would each be given a deadline by which their particular project was due. As these were large projects, they typically would have several months to complete them. I soon discovered that a significant number of freelancers (at least 25% if I’m remembering correctly) would email a couple of days before their assignment was due to report the sad news that they would be missing their deadline because “someone close to [them] had just died”.
Every time I read it, it just gets funnier. On r/talesfromtechsupport, filter by top posts of all time, it’s on the first page. The punch line is … *chef kiss.
Have you ever received or written an out-of-office message that you really liked? If you’re up to sharing them, we’d love to see your favorites. Don’t forget to share this post with friends and colleagues!
The problem was that this had to be done on deadline and people wanted me to do other things for them that weren’t time sensitive. So I put up an internal-only out of office that basically said “hey sorry I’m working on project X and we have a tight deadline. If this isn’t urgent I’ll get back to you next week. If it is urgent, let me know!”
I hate to break it to you, but I’m on annual leave until [end date] and will have limited access to my emails until then.
While I hypothetically could reach my email, while I hypothetically do have my phone on hand, and while I hypothetically do have access to WiFi, I’d rather enjoy time with my family. My kids are growing up at the speed of a supersonic jet, and if I blink one more time, they’ll be 35. And I’ll be 73. And I don’t want that.