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Daimler's Solution For Annoying Out-of-office Email: Delete It
AmiMoJo writes Sure, you can set an out-of-office auto-reply to let others know they shouldn't email you, but that doesn't usually stop the messages; you may still have to handle those urgent-but-not-really requests while you're on vacation. That's not a problem if you work at Daimler, though. The German automaker recently installed software that not only auto-replies to email sent while staff is away, but deletes it outright.
Dear Daimler-Benz
I know it's after hours, but I would like to order 500 cars of the Model S as quickly as possible, color unimportant.
I'll pay double for speedy delivery.
Out Of Office = "I'm not going to get a timely reply"
...aren't already capable of doing this ?
Whose nephew just got money for college ?
Email's strength is that it is asynchronous. I send CC emails to people that I know are not available because I want them to read it when they get back, so they aren't totally clueless as to what happened while they were out scuba diving or whatever.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Don't autoreply to email. Spammers forge From addresses. If you're not going to accept email, reject it straight away on the first SMTP server. Don't accept it first.
I let physical mail pile up and then deal with it when I get back. Ditto electronic mail. Just tell people when you'll be away and that you won't be checking during that time. The only people who get annoyed by this tend to be the sort of people who deserve to be irritated anyhow.
And unlike physical mail you don't have to worry about the accumulation tipping off burglars.
I've never interpreted these auto-replies to mean that I shouldn't send mail to that address. I thought they're just courtesy replies from a robot explaining that it'll be a long time before anyone reads it.
Deleting the email seems like a bad idea. That'll keep the recipient from being able to read it when they return.
And WTF does this have to do with overtime?
You don't have to check it while you are on vacation. You can actually ignore it.
So why delete what could be important communication? Just deal with it when you are back in the office.
Technology isn't the issue here - obviously you don't need special software to auto-delete emails.
The real issue is that Daimler is allowing its employees to do this without fear of reprisals from management.
Lots of email these days are sent to mailing lists with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of recipients, so the sender can expect out of office replies from co-workers s/he's never met. They may live on a different continent. Email is also routinely sent as notifications by application servers, again to large mailing lists, so it must be the poor postmaster that has to wade through all the nuisance out of office replies.
There are people who are either NEVER out of office or ALWAYS out of office. But there's a hard and fast rule you never respond or reply either way.
about what Out-Of-Office responses are meant for. The primary reason you have them is :
You *want* to convey something to a bunch of people and you expect some response. The Out-Of-Office just says don't expect a response from that person. But that person is still expected to read the emails.
Also, there are numerous occasions where people have been assigned tasks that need to be handled later, but the assignment was done when they are out-of-office. My own manager comes in at 8:00 am, while the official work hours start at 9:00 am. So, I get mails just within an hour before the out-of-office period ends. I definitely don't want those emails deleted.
Balachandran "Arise Awake and Stop not till the goal is reached"
In your case (I think it's a more sensible case) the emails should be held in a separate queue and only delivered when the person is back. This way won't feel they need to check their email while away, since they can't anyway.
This sort of measure is needed because regular users, and in particular middle-managers, neither understand nor care to understand the "post office model" of email, and aren't interested in discussions about it's correct vs incorrect use.
As someone who considers things like the lunch hour, vacation time, time spent out to dinner with family, etc as sacrosanct - I wish my own employer would adopt this sort of policy.
If I send someone some important information they want to know and I get back an email saying "I'm on vacaction so I deleted your email" my response will not be very positive. And neither will yours when six weeks later you find you are missing some essential information that was provided to you...
This is the German one, right? Not the different badge on a Jaguar,
If your email client allows you to make an out of office rule, you can make a delete-all-new-emails rule just as easily. I really need to start a company that takes a single feature from existing software and sells it as a stand-alone package...
From Lewis Hamilton
To Ross Brawn
Tell Nico to move over, I 'm doing faster lap times.
Nuke the server from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I did this once and it worked really well. However, in order for it to work, you need a couple of things:
1) The auto-reply needs to be very clear that the original message was discarded and will never be read.
2) The auto-reply must contain contact information of a person who can help out with urgent matters.
It was so relaxing to come back from vacation and not have to face an inbox with 1000 messages...
FTFA: issues a reply to the sender that the person is out of the office and that the email will be deleted, while also offering the contact information of another employee for pressing matters.
and
the program — which is optional — has gone down well with the company’s German employees
Seriously, the idea is that you get to actually take a vacation and let someone else handle the load while you're away. That way, you're not coming back to work with twice the workload as when you left. For many companies, if you take a vacation, no one covers you. The work just piles up. It makes it hard to relax knowing that you've got a mountain of work to return to. No one is taking away "Out of Office" messages or breaking them for people who want to use them.
I've seen several comments here saying "Well, I'm just CC'ing people who need to be kept in the loop!" Ok, I get that. If it's that important, why don't you just wait until they get back and give them a short briefing? If it's not that important, why did you bother sending it in the first place?
I, for one, applaud the effort to push back against the anti-vacation, anti-personal time culture.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Physical mail costs money to send, so you are unlikely to come back from vacation to a pile of 2,000 letters. Email costs virtually nothing to send, so it piles up far more quickly than physical mail.
Also, people who send physical mail tend not to Cc: 25+ recipients just because they can, and there's no physical equivalent of the hellish "Reply to All" button.
As Daimler AG is a German company, many employees will take a whole month off (July-August). Lots of big email (dwgs/photos) can arrive in a month. As a result of US auto-liability litigation, they probably have lawyers limiting the size of their email (&other files) to something the lawyers can digest, like 100 MB per user. Already nearly full, many accounts will lock. To save the fixup grief, just bounce everything. Problem solved.
Look folks -- nothing on the internet, least of all email, is intended to be reliable. That it often is, is no guarantee that it always is. If you don't remember to resend mail when the server is open, or your MTA doesn't follow RFCs then you have only your sloth to blame.
Why should I waste my time resending an email to someone that purposefully deleted it just because they can't set up their email to either forward it to someone that can deal with it, or simply deal with it when they return?
I just don't get it, the worst case is they'll have a weeks worth of email to sort thru on their return. If they delete them all then they'll have an empty inbox on a Monday morning, but by lunchtime it'll be full of resends of from the previous week, so what's the gain except having an easy Monday morning and wasting a lot of other peoples time?
Long story short, if someone did that to me I'd take my business elsewhere, I don't appreciate having my time wasted . Fuck 'em.
So people who go on vacation aren't allowed to catch up when they get back? How about this; if you really want people to not check emails while away, disable their remote access. Turn off ActiveSync for that user, and don't allow them to VPN in.
An Out of Office reply to externally sourced email is effectively a form of auto-responder.
This is a good way to end up on spam blacklists, particularly if you auto-quote the original email.
The spammer sends you an email with a forged from address of their chosen victim. You then auto-respond to them.
In France it is illegal to have staff answer mail out of office hours. How's that for mandatory free time?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The problem with implementing something like this in a US company is the staffing model. European companies tend to have more people doing similar jobs, so that one person actually can fill in for another. Most out of office messages say something like "I'm not here, please contact my manager XYZ for assistance." 9 times out of 10, there's no backup person who can actually provide an answer, simply because there's no backup staff that knows enough to solve a problem.
The other issue is that at least in IT, most places still allow individuals to knowledge-hoard. Often it's unintentional (see understaffing above) because there's simply no time to ensure someone else knows about what you do. But sometimes people do this in a misguided quest for job security. Also, a very small number of people do it to cover something up -- there stories out there about people who found loopholes in purchasing/accounting systems and used them to write checks to themselves or divert equipment...and only got caught when someone else started reviewing things they had been handling themselves.
In my opinion, a lot of the knowledge-hoarding would stop if people were able to trust their employers to keep them employed, or to at least treat them fairly if they had to be laid off. Sure, implementing worker-friendly policies would probably be expensive in the short run, but I can't tell you the number of times I've walked into a new job where the previous individual held all the tribal knowledge about a system or process. I think this policy is a very good one -- especially for employees who work a stressful job and have family commitments, etc. Being able to completely ignore everything during a vacation would be something many employees would stick around to keep. Personally, I have a very busy work schedule and 2 little kids at home. Between not sleeping normally and often having to use my downtime to finish extra work, I would _love_ to be able to say "here, this is your problem now" for 2 weeks. (I wouldn't even have to go anywhere...just put me somewhere to turn off my brain for a couple days.)
It'll never happen here though -- there are too many people who buy into the "job creators" meme and let their employers walk all over them...everyone who even suggests a worker-friendly policy is a lazy entitled socialist here.
Dear Slashdot,
I am currently in the office attempting to work, so I am unable to post a funny, informative or insightful comment on this story. I expect to be goofing off again in an hour or so at which time I will give your story my full attention.
Meanwhile...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Spammers use to use auto response e-mail systems to traffic spam. In the days of Internet providers trying to promote their services, people would email an Internet provider pretending they are going to sign up and the reply e-mail address would be to another Internet provider and they would automatically answer each other all day long. I assume this Deutschland company is not so basic? E-mail ping-pong.
http://www.amazon.com/Mandatory-Fun-Weird-Al-Yankovic/dp/B00L326LTI
Dear Daimler,
You don't really seem to 'get' the value of emails. The point is that they can be processed whenever. To delete them is stupid. Essentially, by negating the time-independent aspect of email, you're reducing it to little more than a phone call in terms of utility.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but the rest of the world doesn't conform to your standards of vacation, and there are even alternate TIMEZONES in this world, so it's entirely reasonable that someone might send an email while you're not there.
I look forward to the first time a Daimler exec sends an email to someone out of the office for something important to be done when they get back from vacation.
Dumb fucks.
-Styopa
This has to be the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard of. If I tell the Post Office to hold my mail while I'm on vacation, I expect to get all of that mail delivered upon my return. Not thrown away.
An email is an electronic form of mail. It is asynchronous. You send it to somebody when you do not expect an immediate reply, but instead expect the recipient to read it as time permits, but within a reasonable time, and respond as appropriate. An OoO is an optional courtesy letting the sender know that a reply will be delayed more than a typical amount of time. (I pretty much never use them, instead just go through my outstanding email and respond when I am available.)
Something is seriously upside-down about the world when otherwise sane business people find it totally normal to never answer their phone (which is a synchronous form of communication) and communicate by trading voicemails, but at the same time expect instantaneous response to emails.
Everyone I work with knows when I'll be out of the office. It is called communication. No one outside of these people is ever going to send me something vital via email without also calling, sending snail mail, and/or visiting me in person.
Email is one of those vital things that isn't.
When my vacation time approached, I loaded a bunch of duplicated emails in the trash folder, and started to operate dangerously close to the mail storage quota.
When I left the office, I left the OutOfOffice reply with the alternate contact. a couple of days after I left, mails would start to bounce.
A couple of days before I was due to return to the office, I connected, just to delete the duplicated email, NOT to check anything.
When I returned, I got fresh email, and the status report from my replacement, go get my up to date/speed.
My two cents, YMMV
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
in charge! Their kind hates and fears technology so they just delete our email at random. Of course that's better than off of the Internet where they have the USPS that they control steals your mail at their orders. It sucks to see so many people give them control. If the smart people all quit that shithole of a company, it would die like their masters want happen to them. Then we could have a chance of creating a car company that isn't ruled by their kind.
If I go on vacation and turn on my out-of-office replies, I don't actually check my e-mail while I am on vacation, and my co-workers are aware of this. My supervisor has my cell phone number, she can call me if there is truly an emergency.
I work as an administrator in a higher education setting, so your mileage may vary ...
This would hardly make a story here. Deleting all e-mail received during one's absence is a standard procedure followed by many. The out-of-office messages usually include a notice to the sender to resend any important e-mails after the recipient's vacation is over. The premises are very simple: old e-mail is most likely no longer relevant or already contains obsolete information at the time one is back to work, therefore dealing with it - even if simply deleting it - is considered a waste of time.
I have a rule (and since I own the company I can do that) that says if someone is on vacation and we have to call them for some work related thing, they don't have to claim that day against their vacation allowance.
Everyone hopes to get called on their vacations, but it is an extreme rarity.
And the best way tools such as this have to communicate updates to those who shoupd get the updates is .... by email. And the Daimler solution would mean I wouldn't easily be able to see the updates I missed.
Surely there are other mechanisms to keep people stress-free while on leave? I just turn off email synching until the morning I return to work (with a suitable OoO message set).
I've always found that if it's really important they will send another copy eventually. :)
That is, any email that can be deleted like this should never have been sent.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I usually have to spend a couple of hours going through my email when I get back from vacation.
Many of them are useless:
Some are useful
Threaded email readers help. Look at the most recent couple emails for each subject, and see whether there is something I need to do or file away for future use.
What I'd really like is if all of the dated stuff would evaporate when it's no longer relevant.