Out of Office Auto-Reply - no return date

Oh no we are far too stodgy of an organization for that, but you get the idea.

I still put an end date on my OOO.

To those who put YABU, I write on mine - "I'll be back on such and such date. Please send your urgent / non urgent work related queries to our department's generic email or call this number and one of my colleagues will respond. I will delete any emails received during my leave on my return."

It stops most of the emails coming in but there is always one who isn't capable of reading a 3-line paragraph.

Having just passed our cyber security audit today, I can confirm that it's best practise not to put a return date on OOOs, for all the reasons above.

If I put a return date, people
who claim their issue is urgent persist on emailing just me despite my escalation contact. If they don’t know I’m back they’re more inclined to actually raise this with my cover.

Vom 😂

I used to work at a very wanky company and OOO messages were regularly about how someone was 'taking time out to reconnect with their family and the environment' or some such shit.

You mean you're taking the kids to Butlins, Steve, and will be drinking every night to numb the pain.

Imagine taking your laptop to the beach! Blow that.

Glad I’m not American sometimes.

We aren’t allowed to take our laptops out of the country at all luckily, and discouraged from taking it on UK holidays

I think having read all this I might try not putting an end date in future!

Not having one presumably encourages people to take their query elsewhere, so it’s one less thing you have waiting for you to do.

This is interesting though as there was a post on Linked In about OOO messages - clearly from an American perspective, as it was saying instead of taking your laptop to the beach (!) put an OOO saying you're away enjoying <experience> and will be giving it your full attention etc.

To me thank is incredibly wanky so I won't be doing it, but I guess it's another way of thinking about it!

Was the code the word FUCK somewhere in the email written in white?

I have two. I'm never off long enough for it to matter that much, and I'm not important enough either so I do put an end date on and sometimes a deputy. Anyone that expects a response on my immediate return can get in the sea, but thankfully they're mostly ok at my work.

External just says I'm OOO and will respond on my return.

I do this for security reasons, I have a unique last name (combination of names) so it would be easy for someone to know I wasn't at home until XX date.

If someone goes off sick in my workplace IT can amend their OOO message.

we have external and internal ones too. The internal ones sometimes have quite a bit of detail, but in any event we all have open calendar access so anyone can see when you’re back.

For the external one I usually just say when I’ll be back and I’ll deal then. No-one has mentioned a security risk with that but I’m quite interested to hear it!

For security, we have two different out of office emails. We only give details on internal. We aren’t even supposed to say we are on holiday on external, just that we are unavailable and they need to contact XYZ.

Microsoft handles it now, but years ago IT just had us put a code in the out of office reply so it couldn’t be sent outside the firewall.

YANBU - but in a fairly small organisation I've had to remind team members at least three times in the last few months, and get the IT support to log in and amend incomplete messages on a couple of occasions.

It’s quite annoying. I have the same problem. I’m not going to bother the secondary contact, especially since I know they are ill-equipped to deal with the issue, unless absolutely necessary. Timeframe makes a huge difference.

i deal with the flurry of people contacting me the second I return by blatantly lying in my out of office auto-reply. It typically starts a day before I’m actually gone and has a return date set for a day or two after I return. I know I’m not the only senior person who does this. its practically a necessity to be able to leave on time for a holiday without pulling an all-nighter and it makes the return much more manageable.

We were always told not to for cyber security reasons. I was also always told not to put in other people's email addresses into the body of an OOO so I just say a generic 'contact another member of the team'.

Security. Cyber and personal.

The only time I haven’t put a return date is when going off on maternity as unsure of dates. The cyber security threat is an interesting thought though!

I think a lot of time it’s so that people can just pop the OOO on without having to adjust the dates etc.
we’ve all received ones before when it states someone is back on 23rd November when it’s actually July!

i never put a return date on my OOO as a few years back i was on holiday then went straight on sick so my OOO was showing the date i was intending to come back, so since then i dont put a date i direct them to a colleague or a shared mailbox to help

I’ve voted YABU .. but only because a Cyber Security expert that came into my organisation a few years ago said that you shouldn’t - particularly for external, but also for internal, as dedicated hackers who treat this as their job are able to find this information out pretty easily and can then leverage that info for egregious purposes

Because people are WAY more likely to go “oh shit I don’t know when she’s back, I’ll figure it out myself” whereas if it says “X is back on X date” everyone goes “oh wonderful, Lego can sort this out”

Other people don't need to know when I'm back. I would have left an alternative contact who can answer any queries in my absence.

I definitely haven’t noticed it. The only time I see no end date is if someone is off sick or there’s a similar reason why they don’t know their return date.