Daimler's Solution For Annoying Out-of-office Email: Delete It 232
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.
Re:It's not annoying (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.
It's OPTIONAL! (Score:5, Informative)
FTFA: issues a reply to the sender that the person is out of the office and that the email will be deleted, while also offering the contact information of another employee for pressing matters.
and
the program — which is optional — has gone down well with the company’s German employees
Seriously, the idea is that you get to actually take a vacation and let someone else handle the load while you're away. That way, you're not coming back to work with twice the workload as when you left. For many companies, if you take a vacation, no one covers you. The work just piles up. It makes it hard to relax knowing that you've got a mountain of work to return to. No one is taking away "Out of Office" messages or breaking them for people who want to use them.
I've seen several comments here saying "Well, I'm just CC'ing people who need to be kept in the loop!" Ok, I get that. If it's that important, why don't you just wait until they get back and give them a short briefing? If it's not that important, why did you bother sending it in the first place?
I, for one, applaud the effort to push back against the anti-vacation, anti-personal time culture.
Re:Defeats the purpose (Score:0, Informative)
Then you can get the blame for the time lost when that person has to read through every single email that they received while they were gone and then try to figure out which are still valid. You'd get canned by any halfway decent manager for doing a half-arsed job and wasting company money.