best out of office message youve seen

[SirQuintusAureliusMaximus]

this is quality and I'm in awe of the bravery.

I am out of the office until Wednesday 3rd January 2024 and will have little / no interest in work during that time. In my absence please contact my colleague [name].

Articulated exactly what I was trying to say. Some emails we send are policy poditions or outcomes of processes or decisions name in their absence. If my team just deleted them on their return I would not be pleased.

That is really annoying. It means that whoever sent the (not immediately urgent but important) email has to remember that this person’s email must be resent on {date}. I have enough stuff to remember, that a man I have sporadic contact with is going to delete my email is not one of them. Whoever set that OoO better be extremely important.

I’ve heard of people who delete all emails received out of office hours. Which is a pity if you work in a different time zone to them.

It does depend on your role and how many emails you get - I know of people who get 200 emails a day, for instance. Obviously there's a wider piece of work around email culture, unnecessary cc-ing and so on, but if you are coming back to literally 1000s of emails after a fortnight's leave, this approach might be the only practical option.

My approach after a holiday is to have a cut and paste "do you still need help with this?" type of reply to send as I go through my emails. Often the matter has already been dealt with, but it means I can delete the original message and wait for their reply; if they don't reply I can assume they no longer need my input.

In fairness, if the person receiving the email gets 200 a day then there’s a good chance that the sender does too. I see what people mean about dealing with workplace stress on returning from holiday but this doesn’t - it just moves the stress to the person sending the email.