If your request is urgent, don’t sit around. Send your request to [contact’s name] at [contact’s email].
If you are going out of office but still leave something interesting for your contacts like poetry, that’s something really out of the box. This is a truly amazing OOO message, and reverting with poetry will surely make the receiver read it twice as emails are the last place one imagines reading poetries. Especially closing with “If all else fails, clear your cache…” is one good way of telling people that they will need proper help and it will anyway take time before they’re all set. Have a look at it here:
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If you're using Mail, you may be surprised to learn that there are no settings or preferences that can enable you to setup an auto-reply like you would on a corporate email system. And there are no preferences for it on iCloud either (hint hint, Apple). The only thing you can do to get around this problem is to setup an Auto Reply rule in Mail. And that's what we're going to show you how to do.
24. "Thank you for calling [company]. We're closed for [holiday] from [date] until [date]. Please leave your message and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Have a happy holiday season!"
That advice Reynolds jokily shared in fact goes directly against a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. Short, sure, and sweet, why not? But ruling out the personal and the emotional? Think again, because those are the very ingredients that can help your correspondents feel more connected to you. Colour your OOO with a dash of personal information – how about saying where you’re off to and why – and you’ve a ready-made conversation starter for the next time your paths cross.
I suppose it’s better than a colleague of mine who’s out of office is always: “I am out of the office until XXX. Please email me if you need assistance.”
Huh. This is a rare column from you that I disagree with almost entirely. I guess to start with what I think you get right, there's no need to apologize for being out of office, and no one should feel obligated to deal with anything other than a legitimate emergency (which are, in most fields, truly rare) while on vacation or while taking time off.
I apologise for this blunt email, yet feel I must warn customers and shareholders to divest yourself of any interests you hold in this company as the **** is about to hit the fan.
Any correspondence (email or phone calls) sent my way will be responded to within 2–3 days of my return.
Thank you for your message. I am out of the office from May 1-6 with limited email access. If you need immediate assistance, please contact my assistant editor, Alex Jordan, at [email protected] or 555-432-6100. Otherwise, I will respond to messages upon my return.
Not an OOO issue but the comment about PTSD from OldJob reminded me of this. I am a recreational sailor who often made longer offshore trips as my vacation. OldBoss INSISTED that we provide contact instructions. Mine was some variant of “Dial O and ask for the Marine Operator. Give them [name of boat], [call sign] and [approximate location by date] along with your name and credit card number. We will be monitoring Channel 16 at these times…..” Never got a call. Word spread and there was a sudden epidemic of sailing vacations in my office!
I do feel like the person who wrote it may have some issues in their organization with, oh let’s call it fire fighting. People who don’t necessarily think through the process of who would be most effective at dealing with the problem at hand. This reads like the message of someone who is used to getting everything dumped in their email and this OOO is an attempt to manage expectations and distribute issues to the people most able to quickly and effectively deal with a range of problems
Oh man, I mostly loved my European colleagues, but the “we were gone for a month, why haven’t you done more?” made me so, so stabby. That or the whole “hey, you really need to work harder to get this done by June 25th because none of us are going to be around to take care of our part by July 1.” So, I’m working 65 hour weeks for a month so you don’t have to spend 8 hours of your vacation working? Sounds fair.
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 had to explain to her that the email was still there, just like a voicemail, they’d get it on their return.
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.”
Different people may create different out of office messages based on what information they want to convey. It can be a simple notification of your absence and the date of your return. Your message can also point the person to some other person or resources to help them when you are away. Let us look at some of the most common examples and templates you can take help from when creating your auto-response out-of-office message.