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Listen to the podcast: Out of Office Replies are Evil. Transcript This is Leo Notenboom with news, commentary and answers to some of the many questions I get at askleo.info. Yes, you heard right, most out of office replies are evil. Out of office replies, often termed "oof" or oof, for out of facility, are those automated replies you get to an email you send someone when they are ... well, out of the office. They'll tell you something like "I'm out of the office this week, and not checking email" or something along those lines. Seems like a good idea, right? Helpful, even. And it can be good idea, IF two conditions are met: 1) The out of office reply is sent to each sender exactly once, no matter how many times they send email. 2) The out of office reply is never sent to mailing lists. For some corporations, there's an optional third rule: the out of office reply is never sent outside the company. So where does the evil come in? Certainly when either rules one and two are broken - or even worse, when both are. If rule 1 is broken, you annoy everyone who might need to send you an email for your eventual return... no mater how many. If rule 2 is broken, your reply goes out to a list of people whether or not the discussion had anything to do with you. And if BOTH are broken, every message to a mailing list causes your out of office message to get sent ... again and again and again ... flooding the mailing list. That's Evil. But wait, there's more. You might just have told anyone who drops you an email that you're on a trip and your home is available for burglary. And You've just replied to any SPAM that you receive, thus validating your email address. Prepare to get LOTS more spam. In general, OOF's are a good idea that, 99% of the time, have gone horribly, horribly wrong. Just say no. Leave me a comment on this podcast - visit askleo.info and enter 8646 in the go to article number box on the home page. I'd love to hear from you. This is a presentation of askleo.info, a free on-line technical question and answer service. Hundreds of questions and answers are online and ready to help solve your computer problems. New questions and answers are added daily. That's askleo.info. • Recent Comments
The OoOF of Lotus Notes works the right way. You can opionally set it to respond to only internal email, i.e., don't respond to email originating outside the company (e.g., SPAM, newsletters, etc.) so it notifies co-workers once. Sadly, Outlook doesn't have that feature so you can't keep OoO Message internal and thus, the feature is not very useful. Posted by: Robert at October 17, 2005 01:00 PMMany years ago a mail storm occurred on our mail server for the exact reasons cited in Leo's article. The lead engineer on our program had activated an email rule to forward all messages he received to the entire engineering staff when the subject line of the message contained certain key words. That produced an out-of-office reply from one of the recipients of the auto-forwarded message, which induced another auto-forward to the engineering distro list, which induced another OOO reply. The ensuing mail storm took down the server. Posted by: Schnazola at July 16, 2007 09:04 AMCouple years ago I was out for surgery and decided to forward my Notes mail from work to my home email. Used my personal address shortcut for my home email address. Notes 'autocompleted' my name and forwarded all of my mail to an employee at our installation in France. MONTHS later I was copied on an email from her supervisor to our corporate IT folks, asking who I am and why am I forwarding so much email to her. Don't I feel like a dope. She got a chuckle when I explained it, I felt so bad for her. Never used oof again. Posted by: Ed Magowan at April 11, 2008 08:38 PMI'm not sure of the "send-only-ONCE" rule, because people may have forgotten the original response, or might wish to check whether you are STILL out. An alternative might be to set the thing up to send a response to any given recipient no more often than once in 24 hours. This will kill any mail loops, but will still provide functionality. Interestingly, the ancient Unix "vacation" command (remember that?) provided this functionality, with a little fudging. :) Posted by: Glenn P., at June 17, 2008 01:36 PMA further issue with OoO's is that all too often, there's never ANY follow-up to one's original enquiry - which drives me nuts! It seems that when the suntanned OoO originator gets back from the Bahamas, he simply bins all the emails that piled up while he was away - apparently assuming a bot (or the fairies?) sorted it all out in his absence. Whatever happened to common courtesy in business? Posted by: Geoff at June 17, 2008 02:10 PMFollow on to my Oct 2005 comment, apparently Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 will now do what Notes did years ago, have the option to only send OoO internally. Haven't used it yet (we're still Exchange 2003) but at least there's hope. Posted by: Robert at June 18, 2008 01:03 PM-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Geoff: I think that particular aspect of common courtesy Leo
iD8DBQFIWXI4CMEe9B/8oqERAvwAAJwIEBua8e6WZRTBW61jkIbBiwLtJwCfWLB9 Exchange 2003 SP2 has the functionality to only send internally. We use have that setting enabled. It's located under Global Settings -> Internet Message Formats -> Advanced. Uncheck "Allow out of office responses" Posted by: North2AK at June 23, 2008 05:34 PMPost a comment on "Out of Office Replies are Evil":
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