Day 222/365: Friday's Unscientific Poll: Automatic replies

[nanila]

Poll #20319 E-mail on holiday

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 60

When I go off on holiday, I set up automatic replies notifying senders of my absence on

my work e-mail account(s)
37 (63.8%)

my personal e-mail account(s)
0 (0.0%)

none of the above
23 (39.7%)

I don't set up automatic replies on my e-mail account because

I like to be mysterious
2 (5.1%)

I figure nobody needs to know (except maybe my boss, if I have one)
8 (20.5%)

I figure nobody cares
10 (25.6%)

They clutter up inboxes
8 (20.5%)

Some other reason which I may describe in comments or may keep to myself (mysterious!)
21 (53.8%)

Comments

[pax_athena]

I still answer my private e-mails - so far I also managed to really keep the private and work e-mails apart even though some private stuff sneaks onto the work account, but luckily not the other way around!
As for work e-mails: with neither of the ones I had so far (4x), I actually knew how to easily setup an automatic reply. I actually really appreciate when I get some from collaborators (the clever ones that only get sent once per recipient). But there isn't a clear "how to" at my current university ... D:

[rmc28]

I don't bother with automatic replies on my personal email because I tend to read that every day, holiday or not. I am probably slightly better at responding when I'm on holiday.

With work email I don't usually bother if I've just got a half day off (I take a lot of my leave as half days because of child or school related stuff) because quite often I might not get back to someone same day anyway. But for one or more full days I always try to set them, so people contacting me know to try something else if it's urgent.

[caulkhead]

I generally check my personal email on holiday, but if anyone really urgently needs to hear from me, they're likely to text.

Putting an 'out of office' on my personal email would just seem pompous. And I only bother with the work one because t's office policy (and, just a bit, because it stops the people who send 'Have you received my email' less than 24 hours after they sent it).

[antisoppist]

I used to put work ones on but I can't now remember how. And on consideration I find it better for building friendly personal relationships with project managers who send me work to e-mail them individually with my holiday dates. Many of my clients have some sort of online system where I can add holidays to a calendar so they don't contact me for a particular period. Scandinavians also expect me to take a long summer break and will have been asking me to tell them when I am taking it since about May. There will be a lot of "did you have a peaceful holiday" e-mails going around from when everyone comes back in mid-August and those sort of brief personal exchanges are also good for building relationships now that a lot of business contact is via anonymous platforms.

[azurelunatic]

Putting one on my personal email accounts would result in a number of out-of-office notices going to mailing lists, Facebook, and Dreamwidth. (More Dreamwidth than Facebook.)

When my work email is mine alone, I use the feature, if I have a vacation. (See: dreadful US labor practices.) Right now it's not, so there's someone on the inbox whether or not I'm there. We do use a calendar system to say which of us are in or out.

[askygoneonfire]

Noobody emails me on my personal account.

I set them up on my work account because academia and the political importance of being seen to work to contract and actually take annual leave.

[angrboda]

I've pretty much only got a work email because we all have one. It's only once in a blue moon that I receive anything in it at all which isn't either a newsletter or some sort of general information sent out to everybody. So setting up that sort of thing strikes me as rather a waste of time.

As for my personal email, I tend to have it with me in the shape of my phone. And as it's my personal, it's used for stuff I actually like. So I feel no need to go away from it.

[fauxklore]

I don't put an absence notice on my home email out of security concerns. Admittedly, I don't publish my address and my condo complex is fairly secure, but I see no reason to advertise that I am away from home.

Except that I am a bit of a hypocrite there because I will post some things to my journal and to facebook.

[hamsterwoman]

Work email:

I don't bother putting Out of Office on for cases where I'm traveling for work for just one day or taking half a day off, because I'll still at least see the email within 24 hours and would be able to respond if it needs an answer quickly -- and if it needs an answer MORE quickly than that, people will call my cell anyway. It's not unusual for me to be trapped in meetings without looking at my mail that long, anyway, so it's not different enough to merit an OOP.

Anything longer than that gets an automatic reply set up, because my role means several dozen people I work with regularly and an even larger random of random occasional people could email me and need something from me within a couple of days. Also, in my group the coverage plans tend to be fairly complicated and this is the best place to put them. When I went for the three week holiday recently, my OOP message was something like: "For program A, coverage is MD, except during week 2, when it's LG. For programs B and C, coverage is BT, except for the last three days, when it's me by cell. For program D, coverage is LG." The thing I really like about the new(ish, I forget when this feature first came in) Outlook is that it pull in and displays the OOP messages as soon as you put the person's email in the "To" line, so I can usually see whether it's worth sending them an email at all, or add their coverage straight away without needing to send a separate forward -- or send those emails that go "I'm just emailing you to get your Out of Office reply because I know you're out but I forgot when you come back. Hope you're having fun! :)"

I also send out a heads up to the people I work with regularly before I take off for a holiday of longer than a week, ideally with about a week's notice, so if there's something they were going to ask me to do, they ask me now, and I can either get it done before the holiday or at least leave my coverage a better passdown. Or give the customers time to accept that it will be a month before the thing gets looked at again :P

Some people at work actually send their vacations as calendared meetings to the people they work with closely / their boss / their coverage (i.e. not just block the time off on their own calendars as an "appointment", but actually send it as a 2-week long meeting to others). I don't do this myself, and I'm torn on whether it's a good practice. On the one hand, it does make it easy to keep track of when that particular person is out and coming back. On the other hand, it clutters up the calendars of the people these "meetings" are sent to, and one can't always tell whether someone's calendra looks blocked all day because THEY are out, or some guy in their group is.

Personal:

No automatic replies, ever. I do still check personal email periodically while on holiday. 95% of stuff I get via personal email does not require a reply at all, and the rest of it definitely does not require any sort of urgent reply. The personal communication that can't wait a couple of days or even weeks has all migrated to texting for me.

Oh, also, I would be concerned about security, because the personal email address is out there on mailing lists and multiple company contracts, and who knows what other information is linked to it. I don't necessarily expect someone to see an automatic reply and come rob my house -- but we had a weird experience last year when a scammer hit our Expedia account just as we left for an international trip (they stole some Expedia points and bought a night in a hotel in Chicago; the whole thing was easy enough to reverse, but took up a morning of holiday travel). The timing might've been a coincidence, but on the other hand, scamming a person while they're traveling is probably awfully convenient, and I'd hate to give them any more advantages.

[jtthomas]

Hardly anyone emails me; everyone who would email me while I would theoretically be away would know that I'm gone, because it consists of approximately five people I talk to on a daily basis.

Also, I'm very rarely gone for more than a day due to not being able to drive, and thus needing to be back home by night. If it's more than a day, someone with me is normally responsible for communication home anyway.

[liseuse]

I set them up on my work emails because I categorically do not check them when I am on leave and I want people to know who to get to if they need something - also it fucks me off when people don't set them.

I don't set them on my personal email because I tend to read that on holiday and am shit at replying to non-work email anyway.

[doccy]

It's a simple situation for me: It has been well over a decade since I had an Official Work Email Address of my own (ignoring a brief stint at a care home), and at the same time it's been a very, very long time since we've been able to spare the time or the money for a holiday. Don't get me wrong, I've -seen- Out Of Offices (and, uh, been impromptu Tech Support for people trying to set them up), but I've not done it myself for a looong while ;)

[cactus_rs]

Anyone who's going to be emailing me personally knows me well enough to know that I'm on vacation. I also inform my clients when I'm going on vacation (and my vacations are usually around 3 weeks, so not toooooo long), so they know to expect a lull in work from my end. But I still get email alerts on my phone, so theoretically I could handle an emergency or a new client contacting me (even if to say: "Shit, sorry, on vacation, make do without me!!!!")

I hate getting them in response to emails I send, too. It clutters up my inbox and it tells me nothing of use. Plus people forget to turn them off, or end up responding to emails anyway, so what's the point?

[sorchasilver]

I check my personal email regardless, and I'm a teacher so my work email is mostly empty when I'm on holiday because so are all my colleagues. Thus, no out of office replies from me.

[chickenfeet]

As far as work goes I don't just need to set OOO messages but delegates in various systems to handle my signing/approval authority. Nobody wants to wait for me to get back from leave to get their expenses or leave requests approved or to get access to data holdings that I "police".

[mummimamma]

For my work email it depends on whether I'm actually checking it or not, like when I went on holiday this summer, I was expecting a couple of emails that I really didn't want to give an ooo-reply (even though it led to me writing the introduction to an article at a pub (only place with WiFi!) in the middle of nowhere). If I'm not there and not reading email for more than a week, I put up an automated reply.

Personal email - never. I rarely get personal email on my personal email anymore,so nobody cares.

Also I really detest getting those replies into my inbox. Well, I detest most kinds of email so...

[silveradept]

For a long leave from work of a week or more, I'll set up the work email to respond, because urgent things can be distributed to other people, usually. My personal email will still likely be checked and responded to on the regular.

If I'm going somewhere with no access and no signal, I might set up such things, but if that's the case, it's likely all the people that really do need to know will know where I'm going and how to contact me.

[ironed_orchid]

It sort of depends on the workplace, at most recent we had a shared account so it didn't matter if I wasn't there, someone was checking it, and if there was a message specifically for me they could reply to say I was on leave.

When I had my own work email account I always set it up with an "I'm on leave until [date], please contact [X] if it's urgent" type message if I was going to be away for more than 3 days. I also had an "I work part time, my days are X, Y, and Z" message in my sig.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Never advertise to the world at large that your house is empty. It can attract trouble.

I don't even know if my email has such a setting. I've never looked for one.

[whereisirisnow]

I always assume that the people I work with most and my friends know I'm on holiday, so they know why I'm not replying. Everyone else is... not important enough to notify..? :p

[euphrosyna]

I don't on my personal email account because I very rarely get emails I need to reply to on my personal account. If I did, I'd probably reply while on holidays. It's so rare that I don't see it as something I need to actively avoid. I do at work though.

[zasu]

I don’t have a work email, and rarely get personal emails anymore, but check my inbox almost daily on my phone during vacations anyway

[word_geek]

Way late to this one, ironically because I've been on holiday, but it's something I do religiously.

My personal email tends to get read when I'm away, mostly, so I don't set any absence message there.

For work, I will set an out of office if I'm working an unusual shift, even, because we have a lot of quite time-sensitive work where the people I work with seem allergic to checking with a collegue if you don't respond, but then complain bitterly that you didn't respond before you arrived at 10am.

I also set an out of office "dead man's handle" every day - essentially Outlook will let you set an automsated one time only message for a specific period ahead of time.

After a colleague was ill for a few days and we kept having to deal with her stuff at 4pm because the people she was working with didn't check in with us earlier to see if she was in (see above), I started literally setting my Outlook to send a response "If you get this message, I may be ill, please contact $sharedmailbox" and I push it on a day every morning before it kicks in at 9:30am.

It's useful every single time I'm ill, and sometimes if the Tube is busted.

H