Would this be acceptable in your workplace?

[olderbutwiser]

I’ve started to receive out of office emails saying “I am out of office until xxx. Please resend your email after that date”.

I may be a dinosaur, but to me it’s unacceptable to put the onus on the sender to resend their email on some random future date. Clearing piled-up emails when I get back to the office is just one of those things you have to factor into your working life.

Votes please:

Perfectly acceptable nowadays, you’re a dinosaur —> You Are Being Unreasonable
It’s completely unacceptable, time for a Meeting Without Coffee —> You Are Not Being Unreasonable

I work with an awful lot of consultants and clients and have never seen it,

It’s really easy it’s just one button. 🙂

Yanbu. It's wildly unreasonable and unprofessional to expect people to re-send their emails

Thank you. I'm clearly not techy savvy but will have a look at how to do it tomorrow when I log in.

So are you dealing with 500 a day when you are not on leave. It seems people want to get on with their real work when returning from leave and delete all emails, but when not on leave accept and deal with the volume.

Don’t think my work would like it but it’s inspired!

The idea is that people bulk delete emails received in their absence when they get back from leave.

My DH and many of his colleagues do this. I’m not sure I approve but they would have literally hundreds of emails to look through after a week’s holiday otherwise. Their large organisation sends a huge amount of info that he reads little of anyway.

It also highlights how the vast majority of work emails I receive are completely pointless.

Agree. I think it's fine.

Happens all the time in my workplace. Sign of laziness if you ask me. I would never waste my time to have to plan and resend after their holiday

Exactly. It's not a huge deal.

It sounds like the kind of thing you would do if thought you were 100% secure in your job and someone else provided the clients.

Very common in my workplace. The OOO is to inform that recipient is unavailable and the expectation is to contact one of the alternatives or if absolutely no one else can help - re contact on their return.

Discussed this with a senior manager only the other week, was told that she returned to over 300 emails within a week and had no means of spending that time catching up with similar numbers pouring in every day. Therefore the box is deleted and if it is important she would get the second request on her return.

I think it is a pragmatic approach and stops people from becoming trapped in email answering on their leave or working over hours to catch up on return (something that was previously an exception in the organisation but it slowly being eradicated due to stances like this).

Same never seen it. Standard reply is I’m on leave and will respond upon my return.

It’s common at my work place. I do leave a ‘handover’ person to delicate to in my ooo but if it’s not urgent and can wait for my return then people can just schedule to send on my return.

i however see by this thread that many people don’t know how to do that so i guess they would find it rude or inconvenient to them.

when you get 100s of emails a day it takes so long to go through inbox when you get back whilst also still receiving those 100s of emails you normally get.

It’s becoming more and more common, I rather like it as it means you actually get holiday time rather than having to make up for it afterwards. I work on a broadly similar basis. I’ll filter the several thousand unread email for anything external or from my boss / senior people. The rest I’ll assume either got dealt with in my absence, or if it’s still needed they’ll mail me again. I just don’t have the time to work out whether two weeks of requests are still current.

That works for people working for the same organisation, but not for all the other people I send e-mails to.

No.
If I've sent someone information about something, that is that task completed and I move to the next one.
If they are stupid enough to delete it, then that's their loss. They've missed out on that information. I don't have the capacity to start lists of who might read their e-mails on which days. Nor do I have the capacity to go back to a task that I have finished because someone else is too lazy to do their job properly.

This would be encouraged at my office. A lot of emails are dealt with by the time you return so it wastes a lot of time clearing or following up on queries that have long been dealt with. Also, there’s a big push for MH, ‘when you’re off your off’ sort of thing, many people have work phones or access to work emails in their personal phones so work emails can often disturb down time. This is fine if it’s urgent, but they’re often not.

I work with older generation Germans.

Their out of office.

"I am out of office until 7th of May. Your email will not be forwarded."

Where did I said I read the 500 emails I get a day?

I read, perhaps, a quarter - if that.

This is where AI can be useful. Ask it to summarise your inbox, delete marketing emails, and flag up any actions.

@Worriedsickmostofthetime if you are using outlook on a desktop / laptop, it’s on the menu at the top called “options”. It’s a very useful tool.

I've never seen this in real life and wouldn't be impressed. I also wouldn't resend unless it was purely to my benefit to get an answer.

I got 6 out of office replies to 1 email today.
I’m not going to reschedule the emails to auto send on :
Monday to Jane
Tuesday to Bob
Wednesday week to Rita. etc.
They have the email it’s entirely to them to delete, Ignore, follow up on their return.

I guess it may work in organisations with low email traffic, where I work not a chance. I receive 100s of pointless spam emails and send upwards of 30 emails a day. Resending to align with everyone’s calendars would be carnage.