My boss requires us to put a nightly OOO message up, and I HATE it. I pushed back on it for months at first, because people know and understand that the reason no one is responding at 8pm is because the business is closed (or at least, they should understand that…). It wasn’t worth the fight, my boss thinks it’s so important, so I caved and just turn on the message every night. I think it makes us look immature and like we don’t understand business norms, but it’s not the hill I’m willing to die on.
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.

The other being I did it once at my current job, pointed them to my boss, and he called me every time someone reached out to him. It was SUPER annoying, because not a single thing was time sensitive or really even remotely important, and if I hadn’t given a contact person they would have just waited. But I’m really the only person that does that I do, so when I’m gone, they just have to wait. :shrug:
When you’ve finally powered your way through that seemingly endless to-do list and are ready to check out of work mode once and for all, there’s one final thing you need to take care of: setting your out-of-office response.