Should holiday email be deleted?

[janusz]

There ought to be a word - and perhaps there is, in German - for the mix of feelings that accompanies composing and activating a holiday out-of-office message. But for many of us, these nice feelings are tempered by the knowledge that in two weeks, refreshed but depressed, we will have to trawl through hundreds of emails, many of which will be conference room notifications for meetings about crises that have passed. But for employees at Daimler things are a little different. Email these people while they are on holiday and you will get a message like this:

I am on vacation. I cannot read your email. Your email is being deleted. Please contact Hans or Monika if it's really important, or resend the email after I'm back in the office. Danke Schoen.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28786117

[Adrian Bell]

This is a typical "out of office" message - With no contact details provided for Hans or Monica, this happens more often than not.

[janusz]

It's not typical in my experience. I've never seen a "mail will be deleted" vacation message. And of course this is just an example, in real life contact details provided for Hans or Monica are provided.

[FredOnline]

I've never seen a "mail will be deleted" vacation message either - and I'm pretty sure my bosses would take a dim view of it, as it may upset our more sensitive/demanding customers.

[EmailHosting]

Sifting through a few more holiday messages should be no big deal unless the messages are in fact spam.

That is just ridiculous to hear of those messages being deleted. Holiday messages may help the culture around the office in making it more cheerful. A happy workforce is typically a more productive workforce.

[n5bb]

I think that most people ignore the content of out-of-office automatic reply messages if they are sending messages to a large email group. So this is similar to throwing away all of your postal mail while you are away. Of course, there may be good things (checks or anticipated announcements) in your mail while you are gone, or bad things. The major difficulty would be automated announcements or group announcements where replies are not monitored.

I'm in a sales-related job, and it would be very foolish for me to delete incoming email while I was away. That would be very poor customer support! If you won't be able to read the messages for an extended period, your incoming mail should be forwarded to a trusted co-worker who can handle any issues while you are away.

Bill

[webecedarian]

I like that, but would like is even more if it said I will not read your email, instead of cannot.

But mostly I wanted to commend you for using "trawl." Most people have come to imagine that the word is "troll."

[kaptitsky]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-ministry.html

The guidelines state that ministry staff should not be penalised for switching off their mobiles or failing to pick up messages out of hours.

The move follows similar restrictions on out-of-hours email imposed by German firms including Volkswagen, BMW and Puma.

VW stops forwarding emails to staff from its company servers half an hour after the end of the working day, while other firms have declared that workers are not expected to check email at weekends or in their free time.

If the goal is to not require people to engage e-mails when they are off-duty, then demanding they dig through backlogs when they return may not be expected either.

I bet there is a study somewhere that says people can't pay attention to more than X e-mails in an hour and beyond that number, attention diminishes to a point where important information is likely to be missed.