My department still doesn’t allow us to send OOO auto-replies to external recipients because of one incident years ago (a customer tried to contact a sales rep about an urgent order, got the rep’s auto-reply, and in their ensuing panic, somehow got escalated all the way up to the company president). Any external emails we get are auto-forwarded to a centralized mailbox and (ostensibly) handled by another rep while we are out. It bothers me to know that my external contacts won’t get a reponse from me while I’m out and may think I’m just ignoring them.
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Just kidding, I'm not in Hawaii. How awesome would that be though, right? Instead, I'm enjoying a peaceful vacation in my living room. That being said, I'm not in the office right now, and will respond to your email after [date].
I can just about see having two OOOs: one for the actual leave time, and one for the first day you are back in the office, so people are aware you are digging yourself out of the emails and to please call or IM if it is time-sensitive.
4.) Bienvenue chez John Doe Solutions. En raison d'un événement en interne, notre secrétaire n’est pas disponible aujourd'hui. Vous êtes le bienvenu à laisser un message. Nous serons de nouveau à votre service lundi. Merci pour votre compréhension.
“Hi, Sorry I missed your call/text. I’m currently out of the office and will not be back until Feb 2. My colleague [name] has agreed to respond on my behalf, so feel free to forward the message to [phone] if it is urgent. You can otherwise expect a response from me once I return. Thanks for understanding.”
I usually go with “Hickory, dickory, dock, I’m off the clock. When the clock strikes Tuesday, I’ll be back.”
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.
Out of office emails should be short, succinct, and to the point – and should never include more information than is needed.
The first part of the process is to click on the Settings button in the top right-hand corner the Gmail dashboard, before clicking See All Settings.
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:
I absolutely hate this and it would definitely irritate me if received. I agree with the letter writer that it comes over as condescending and also a bit passive agressive in places. I’m definitely not the audience for this one! Presumably this is an internal only version and the company culture would find this cute / funny.
I’ve seen similar things with OOO messages where people would update them practically daily. “I’ll be away from my desk from 9-2 with intermittent emails and then on a call from 3:-3:45” and ….dude. We don’t need that much detail every day.
It's a tip that Kate Leaver, Australian author of the newly published book The Friendship Cure: A Manifesto for Reconnecting in the Modern World, has long championed. “I usually just describe the most delicious thing I'll be eating while I'm away. I've been told it makes people very jealous, in a happy-for-me sort of way,” she says. A typical auto-response from her reads: “OOO: Busy eating my body weight in gelato. Gleefully, wifi isn’t great on windswept Italian beaches so I will likely not see your email for days.”
In this post, I’ll go over what an OOO message is and share some of the best examples I’ve found on Google, as well as a few from my coworkers).
Q. Are there sample voicemail and out-of-office email messages that we should use?
'I’m away from my desk at the moment but will respond the moment they give me a desk' (Credit: Getty Images)