Did I mention that I loathe the whole concept of an out of office reply? People in the company I used to do IT for were obsessed with the damn things, to the point of ludicrousness.

Examples include:

- Someone phoning up from the South Of France five days into their holiday to say that they had forgotten to set one and could I do it and arrange for all the people who had mailed them since they went away to be sent one anyway.
- People phoning me to say that they had noticed that their colleague had gone away without setting one and so could this be set urgently - this in a department who routinely shared their login details with each other and checked each others email when they were not around.
- People who would set one and then SEND THEMSELVES A MAIL to check it worked, triggering a mass loop that would mean we’d spend Sunday morning trying to avoid the server dying.
- People who would panic when their second mail of the day to an address failed to get an autoreply. On being told that the software now made sure it only sent one notification per address they viewed it as a disaster.
- People setting a reply when they left their desks TO GO TO LUNCH or when they left for the afternoon after working the early shift.
- People asking if there was a way they could set one for their home email and thinking it strange when I asked them why they wanted to advertise to any random emailer that they were out of the country and leaving their home unattended.

Nothing shows you the size of someone’s ego better than their obsessions with automatically generated emails. Better yet are the ones that say “if your query is urgent then please telephone…”. If it was that urgent surely I would have telephoned in the first place rather than waiting to be told this was the best way to get a response…

I have worked with people who set-up an out of office reply just after sending their last few emails before a couple of weeks in the sun. ISPs have been known to barr ip addresses with unusual amounts of traffic caused by an erroneous out of office reply.

There “should” be a field marked “Auto-Submitted: auto-replied” in the header. Both Microsoft Exchange (looking at a BBC bounce) and Novell Groupwise (looking at a Chrysalis Radio bounce) do not set this header field.