Wednesday, August 23, 2006

I hate the "Out of Office Reply" setting...

So it's 3:30am. I have just about wrapped up the latest round of patching (30 hours ahead of a visit from the auditors, by the way), and have realized that I created a large number of emails to myself about machines I rebooted. (and didn't get all the paged I should have - a problem for when I'm not so tired...)

Anyway, the backup server dutifully emailed to the backup list that it was back online. I actually wonder how I can stop this function, it bothers me in and of itself, but immediately after that, Out of Office replys come back to the list. I am not a fan.

My biggest problem with the Out of Office Reply is that it makes me think that you think that I need to know you are not there. I don't. In fact, many, many, many times, I recieve email and ignore it for days. Especially from particular people. If figure, if they go away, I send an email, and don't hear back for a week, so much the better in most cases. It means I can get other stuff done.

Maybe I should just write a rule in my mail client, and quiese the messages to that I never see them again. Maybe it's just the sleepiness talking.

I have a "8:30: drop Kate off at school - 8:45: pancakes with blueberry syrup - 9:00: sit and listen to an arguement at work without getting very involved - 9:30: go get an oil change" morning, so I guess I'd better say so long for now. If I come back in 12 hours and this post makes no sense, I will delete it...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

it's close to making no sense. but i think it does suffice.

Pro Payne said...

I get A LOT of Out-of-Office messages, often in other languages like, "Ich werde ab 02.09.2006 nicht im Büro sein. Ich kehre zurück am 11.09.2006."

They come to my postmaster@ alias in response to our non-delivery reports that are being sent in response to randomly addressed spam. We have our own system set so that it doesn't send O-O-O messages out to the Internet, but apparently there are a lot of systems that do.

jjp said...

Hmm... They might not be so bad being in different languages, provided the rate didn't increase...

I reserve the postmaster setting on my machines for people that tick me off. Then they get to be the postmaster for long enough to know I was there. Lots of cron job reports, HW status messages, etc.

If someone really ticks me off, I send them a SCSI terminator in Campus mail. Just a little joke I like to play.