John C. Dvorak rants has request demand: “Stop Using AutoReply!!!” (via Lifehacker).

I’m not sure what people John’s been communicating with, but where I work - it’s used pretty darned effectively.

When you use Auto-Reply (aka “Out of Office Assistant” in Exchange - commonly just “OOO”):

• When you’re not available to answer emails.

…yeah, that’s it.

Where I work (a multinational company with tens of thousands of employees), we use OOO replies to let colleagues know not to expect a response any time soon.

No, it’s not perfect - and yes, when you’re replying to an email where every-man-and-their-dog is CC’ed in, you get an OOO notification for those who’re out. But, you only get it once (again, it’s a setting, which is defaulted to “on”) for that person. Even if you send that person another email while that same OOO reply is no, you won’t get it again.

The OOO notifications are only sent to those who’re on the corporate address book too, so spam bots don’t get an email confirmation. The one drawback from that is that vendors and customers don’t get a response, and need to be set up on a whitelisted AutoReply.

It’s very helpful for situations where people go on leave for months (and maternity leave for up to 12 months), and someone on the other side of the country is trying to find out who can deal with something.

(Before you say “You should have let them know before you went on leave” I can think of a dozen situations where that won’t work all the time. Getting someone else to manage your email isn’t always an option either)