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Daimler's Solution For Annoying Out-of-office Email: Delete It

Posted by samzenpus on from the keep-your-away-messages-to-yourself dept.

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.

8 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. It's not annoying by mwfischer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Out Of Office = "I'm not going to get a timely reply"

    1. Re:It's not annoying by Jason+Levine · · Score: 5, Informative

      Proper out of office messages will also give you the name and number or e-mail address of the person to contact if this is an urgent matter. So for a routine issue, you'll know that you at least have to wait X days until the person returns. For an urgent issue, you can expedite matters with one more contact.

      I can't see Daimler's solution being used anywhere to good effect.

      --
      My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
    2. Re:It's not annoying by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Defeats the purpose by sandytaru · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Defeats the purpose by JackieBrown · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Defeats the purpose by Lemmeoutada+Collecti · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wonderful, your world can keep going. Please contact my alternate (as indicated by my OOO reply) and they will make sure your world maintains its vital impetus. If it's not worth contacting them, then it's not that important at all, and you can reach out to me when I get back.

      --

      You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
  3. Funny thing about email by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:I'll check that immediately by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).