A. On the Health Science Campus, Morse Center will be open. The Recreation Center on Main Campus will be closed during winter break, resuming normal business hours after New Year's Day.
My coworker tends to set his OOO for people to contact me, but he never bothers to tell me he’s going to be out of town and people may be contacting me. I’ll find out when I happen to email him and get the response. Not a huge deal, but the heads up would be nice! What if I was also on vacation?
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Website: https://www.onsip.com/voip-resources/smb-tips/after-hours-voicemail-and-auto-attendant-greetings
I’ll return on [date] or after I watch [favorite holiday movie] one too many times (whichever comes first)—and will respond to your message at that time.
Most of what I’m describing (as well as boyd) boils down to examples of clear, honest, communication. While it sounds simple, such openness is extremely rare in the workplace. It is rare because, especially with time off, this type of communication requires the sender to be vulnerable, to cede control, and/or to be assertive and frank about one’s needs.
4. Respond to Urgent Emails Only. If you’re taking a few days off and want to respond only to urgent emails, this template would be a great fit. Hi (specify the Name field id),
YES. I was actually just going to go on the weekend thread and ask if I was the only one that really hates this term.
I know I’m supposed to say that I’ll have limited access to email and won’t be able to respond until I return — but that’s not true. My blackberry will be with me and I can respond if I need to. And I recognize that I’ll probably need to interrupt my vacation from time to time to deal with something urgent.
Oh shoot. You need something and I’m unavailable today. Here’s the good news: you have options.
My boss does not understand OOO and thinks I saw his email and sent the reply personally and does not understand why I didn’t answer the actual question.
“The world is serious enough as it is - people need, and usually appreciate, an unexpected moment of levity in their day,” he says, when quizzed about how recipients might respond to such an OOO. He also confides that he himself has dispensed with auto responses altogether – though not for idealistic reasons. “The last time I tried to set one up, I botched it so badly that somehow it resent every single email in my outbox from the previous year - client emails, firing notices, literally thousands of emails.”
When crafting an out-of-office reply, keep in mind that you must provide sufficient detail so that recipients understand exactly when you’ll not be able to respond.
Oh gosh. You’ve just reminded me that I was supposed to change my VM before every vacation or holiday at my old job. Something I completely forgot to do after the first year. Whoops!
Yeah, that’s not enough to stress over. Try coming back to tens of thousands after parental leave.
Perhaps I’m you guys’ worst nightmare, but for the past couple of years I’ve been writing haikus for my OOO, which give a flavour of what I’m out doing. A couple of examples:
Remember to make sure your auto-reply has a limit to how often it sends replies to any one address. If they reply to every single email they recieve, they can cause problems: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/420oan/companywide_email_30000_employees_autoresponders/ I actually had that happen while I was on vaca, a travel agency e-mailed me with an update about my vacation from a no-reply mail box and triggered my auto reply, which triggered their “This is not a monitored mailbox” auto reply to the tune of 80,000 messages in my mailbox. It completely filled up my “available” space, so everytime I logged in and thought I had them cleared out, more would pour in. It took DAYS to delete all of them.
Yeah, I have to agree. It’s a lot of explaining of things that are likely to be obvious to many people, as though they haven’t considered these options, but that they have to sit through anyway in order to get the information they need about who to contact. And the people who most need to listen to it probably won’t.