Thank you for your email. I’m currently out of the office, returning on [return date].
I worked for a federal contractor back during the Great Recession when government offices were shut down/working with a skeleton crew. I still remember getting OOOs from almost every email address in the agency we worked at explaining they were on furlough & to contact one specific person if the issue was urgent. We all assumed this poor person was hiding under her desk, rocking back & forth, with her head in her hands.
.
Voice mail is a strictly worse medium than almost any alternative. You don’t get the opportunity to converse and ask questions back and forth like you do with a phone call; you can’t extract information efficiently from the message like you can with an email (the old “ugh, I have to listen to this entire message over again just to check one thing he said at the end” scenario).
I will be out of the office starting on (beginning date) and ending on (ending date).
Filter Type: All Time (20 Results) Past 24 Hours Past Week Past month Post Your Comments?
I will surely respond to your email when I’m back in the office. But, if this requires an immediate response, please resend any messages that require my immediate attention with a subject line of “URGENT: [Original Subject]”.
Don’t let my absence keep you from missing out on the latest updates. Follow us on *Facebook / *Twitter/ *LinkedIn / *Instagram. You will love our GIFs on Twitter, trust me.
I am out of the office from [date range]. If you need immediate assistance, please contact [name, title and contact information].
Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.
This is [NAME’s] bot. [NAME] is indisposed and unable to respond to your email. I’m replying to let you know that she will return to her desk on [DATE]. It is her intent to attend to your request promptly at that time. Meanwhile, [NAME] leaves you with the following message.Please ponder its significance: “I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.” — [NAME]
Or they work with one or more of those people that call you 5 minutes after sending an email if you don’t reply.
Do you know what we’re doing too much of? We’re working too much, and we think too seriously about ourselves while doing it. That’s why including a joke or something fun in your out of office message could be so powerful.
I set my OoO for individual public holidays, because I know they’re not global, and I get emails from lots of different countries.
We have one key administrative assistant who works part time and I always forget — I appreciate that she sets an OOO every day because her department is very deadline driven and it helps me to remember that if I need something from them, I need to connect with her in the morning. We also have some staff who work the school year calendar and others who are year round; the OOO is so helpful in the summers!
So now this email is working overtime with the flood of enquiries, spam, well-wishes, and broken hearts.
Out of office messages can be as concise or detailed as you need but should follow a standard structure. Here are two templates you can use to create your own message.
I ran a nonprofit organization staffed entirely be volunteers (I was one). After one too many people incensed that we did not follow up to their emails within two hours, we had to include an OOO message that said we were a volunteer organization, and any request may take up to two weeks to process. Please email again if you have not heard from us by then.