University-wide mail services will be running a reduced schedule, accepting all mail from both postal zones and sorting; however, deliveries will be made to only a few approved locations on Main Campus. Hospital and clinical operations will not be impacted and will receive normal mail pickup and deliveries during winter break.
Thank you for calling [Company Name]. If you know your party’s extension, please dial it at any time. To reach our company directory, press 1. For more information about [Company Name], press 2. If you are an existing customer, please press 3. For billing questions, press 4. To repeat menu options, press 9. For all other inquiries, press 0. 3. Language Options
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I would be SUPER annoyed to get this! I agree it seems condescending and it’s just too long.
So, because I want you to be able to enjoy your time off, I’ve put together these two email templates to help you make it abundantly clear that you’re not around for the next 24 hours.
PHONE PLUS Holiday Greetings. Adding the Holiday Greeting messages to your PHONE PLUS system will enable you to inform callers immediately when you are closed during holidays. For a one-time investment of only $299, we’ll load all your messages in advance into your system & you can select which MAIN greeting you want playing.
Even if you have a job you love, there are few things more satisfying than turning on an out-of-office email responder–especially when it’s for an actual vacation. There’s some serious relaxation in your future, and it’s well-deserved.
If you don’t clearly state the dates on which you will be disconnected from work, your office co-workers and clients will most likely send you multiple emails, clogging your inbox. That will make it quite difficult for you to catch up when you get back. Also, if you don’t include the name and contact information in your outgoing message for the co-workers who can help in your absence, your well-deserved and pleasant vacation time could get in the way of specific projects in the company.
In 2013, researcher danah boyd wrote a LinkedIn blog post advocating for the nuclear option which was framed in the piece as an “email sabbatical.” Coming back to an empty inbox after a vacation is should be a break from the insanity, not a procrastination of it,” boyd wrote of the decision to send everything to the trash.
I had to explain to her that the email was still there, just like a voicemail, they’d get it on their return.
My OOO is almost always “I’m out of the office and will be returning on x date.” My email sig has instructions along the lines of “for questions on x, email this list” for a couple of the more common areas people would contact me about that might need an urgent reply (as the lists go to more than just me, obviously), but most people have finally figured out to contact those lists to start with, anyway. If I were in the middle of a project or something that needed to be moved along in my absence, the project teams usually know when we’re out, but I’d put a back up in that case, if needed, but generally there’s not much to be gained by a longer OOO from me.
The attendant menu for your main contact number may be the first form of contact that a customer has with your business. Make sure your greeting is clearly articulated. Provide an option to speak with an operator if the caller has a question that is not addressed by the menu options.
Navigate to mail.google.comClick the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner below your account name:Click Settings:Scroll to the bottom of the page to the Vacation Responder blockTurn your Vacation Responder on:Set active dates for the Vacation Responder:
My mom works part time at a library in archives, where her personal work email is also the general archives email (ie LibraryNameArchives @ email . com). She has an out of office response that replies with her work hours (since she’s the only employee in the archives) so people know when she’s in the library and can respond or when they can come in and visit her. The only frustrating thing is that her email either isn’t capable of, or she doesn’t know how to, turn off the OOO email when she’s actually in the office, or doesn’t trust that she’ll remember to turn it back on. She’ll send me an email about something, I’ll respond, I’ll get an OOO response, she’ll respond, I’ll reply, I get an OOO reply, etc etc.
*When a holiday falls on a Saturday, it is observed on the preceding day. (When the preceding day is also a holiday, both holidays are observed on preceding days.) When a holiday falls on a Sunday, it is observed on the following work day.
Thank you for getting in touch! I’ll be out-of-office from [date] to [date] and will not be checking email during that time.
But this absence of basic travel cybersecurity is a problem. Email is the number one threat vector for socially engineered attacks. An automatic reply message not only sends the information to designated contacts, but it also bounces back to people who send phishing emails. Threat actors use any details found in OOO messages to craft targeted social engineering messages. Well-targeted messages build trust that threat actors take advantage of.
If you’re anything like I am, you probably fall into team two. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to get creative. But if you plan ahead, you might be able to craft some hilarity.