One of my favorite OOO messages I ever received was from a customer who was a barrister or soliciter (not sure the right term for an English lawyer). It said he would be unavailable because he is “on trial.”
Thank you for your email. Your message is important to (Us/Me) and (I/We) will respond as soon as possible.
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If you don't see the Automatic Replies button, follow the steps to use rules to send an out of office message. Set up an automatic reply
My grandboss used to put in his OOO: ‘I’m out of the office. If you need x or y, contact Andy or Jane. They know stuff.
You can manually turn on DND mode to auto text, see the video with steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0jJwjpE87o.
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:
12. "Hi, you've reached [company]. We're available by phone from [hour] to [hour] [time zone] Monday through Friday [optional: and from hour to hour on the weekends]. You can also contact us by going to our website, [URL], and live-chatting or emailing us. If you'd like us to call you back, please leave your name and number after the tone."
With a slightly modified email address to mirror yours, they can easily impersonate you using the personal information provided in the OOO message and exploit your absence. Knowing where you are and how long you may be gone can lead to an attempt to initiate a transfer of funds or access confidential data. They might even go the extra step and reference how great their “trip” is going just to make the message appear genuine.
It got bad enough that others began begging someone to cull the list. Reply all, of course (thankfully it didn’t turn into an explosion of replies all). Someone finally did remove the email from the list.
Supervisors with employees who work during winter break should track hours using the Winter Break Hours Tracking spreadsheet. Please follow the instructions provided and contact your Human Resources consultant with any questions.
Let’s say you’re a CFO headed to Cancun for your annual vacation. You write an OOO message that contains: The dates of your departure and return Contact information for a colleague that will be available in your absence Some details about your destination
I pretty much never pay attention to out of office replies, just note if there is one. If I really need something urgently I’ll look to see if there’s another person’s contact info, but it’s rarely that urgent. I might also look for a return date, if that matters to me. It would annoy me if I had to wade through a wall of text to find either of those things.
I don’t do them for meetings. I do have one that I turn on every Tuesday afternoon since I don’t work Wednesdays. In our culture it’s not uncommon for people to check EMail when they’re off. I don’t do that so I need to let people know. I also put a status message up on Teams. I work with a team of 40 people and I can’t expect them all to remember when I’m there and when I’m not!
Something that actually was an issue with my employer ages ago: at one time there was a policy that out of office would only go to internal people, and nothing would be sent at all to anyone external. Apparently this was felt necessary in order to mitigate risk of burglary, so people wouldn’t know that “John Winchester has gone on a hunting trip” and that his house was empty.
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Thanks for your message! I’m currently buried in snow and will get back to you once I’ve defrosted on January 2nd.
A couple work friends and I banded together years ago to fill each others’ voicemails so it would be impossible to leave us new voicemails.