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.

Comments

Re:Defeats the purpose

[JackieBrown]

I used to do something similar as the author. My out of office was something to the effect of

"I will be out of the office from XX to XX. During this time, John will be my point of contact and he can be reached at john@email.com.

If you prefer to wait until I return to work, please send me a follow up email so I know your request still needs attention."

That said, I still went through all my emails when I came back. This system just helped me prioritize.

Re:I'll check that immediately

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is to not have work pile up while on vacation. I do not think people use "out of office" for after work hours.

Some of the people I work with use "out of office" for weekends. It's a passive-aggressive way of fighting back against the corporate expectation that everybody will login for email 24/7 (an expectation that got worse as corporate-issued mobile email devices got pushed further down the ladder).

Re:It's not annoying

[AmiMoJo]

So for a routine issue, you'll know that you at least have to wait X days until the person returns.

Problem is that it's more like X days + however long it takes that person to do all the other tasks that have built up while they were away.

Daimler are just moving the work from the person on holiday to the people sending them emails. Instead of that person having to sort all their email when they get back, the people sending the email sort it for them while they are away. Anything that can be passed on to others is, anything that has to wait gets re-sent if it is really that important.

No-one likes to come back to an inbox full of crap after a holiday, and it probably doesn't help Daimler either. Many of those messages will be pointless and get deleted instantly anyway. The person will waste lots of time chasing other people to see if they handled things.