Out of Office Auto-Reply - no return date

[NameChangedJuly]

Has this become a thing? I’ve noticed people in my company now have an OOO message that simply says ‘I’m currently on holiday, for anything urgent please contact x or text me on xxxx”

in the past - it is always ‘I’m on leave, returning on x date…” Which I have continued to do but others don’t, which is not very helpful for something important but not urgent enough to contact someone else or disturb their leave.

YANBU - it’s weird not to state return date
YABU - people don’t put return dates on internal OOO responses

YANBU. All I want to know is are you back tomorrow (in which case my question will wait) or in three weeks’ time (in which case I’ll ask the person your email directs me to (or your manager if it doesn’t)).

If on holiday with a confirmed date that's rubbish.
If however it's unexpected OOO it's understandable, eg sick or unexpected event.
Eg a colleague of mine just lost her husband, obviously her OOO just says on leave

I noticed this today with a colleague and later in the day someone informed me that she had taken some extended leave and was off for a month. I assumed then that she hadn't put a return date as she didn't want people gossiping about why she was getting so much leave!

I can see both sides.

On one hand it might be useful info.

On the other...if people know I'm back on Monday they might expect a reply that day, and their email might be 58th on my list after being off for a week.

I've noticed this too, and I have to say it is more than a tad irritating.

It really makes a mockery of my monthly planning schedule. I don't know when it is safe to pop round.

agreed totally understandable for unexpected leave, but most of these colleagues are just on their annual (planned/pre-booked) summer holiday! There is a way to find out their return from the holiday system, but involves having to login and search (after receiving the OOO which could have just told me!)

I've just started doing this recently. It really works to cut down the amount of tasks waiting on my return. As people don't know when I'll be back, they're more likely to deal with stuff themselves rather than wait for me to get back. Win.

I don't because I don't want a million emails on my first day back! But we have an office calendar, so anyone internal who needs to know can look on there.

Certain people do it for security. If a hacker gets an OOF saying that you are out of the office for two weeks and have no access to your emails it gives them a timescale to work to. If it just says you are OOF it creates uncertainty and so they are less likely to try and hack .

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.

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.

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”

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

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 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!

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!

Security. Cyber and personal.

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'.

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.

thanks for the replies! Interesting that there are genuine reasons I hadn’t thought of.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.