Out of office message: saying who to contact, not that you are away

An out of office message is the automatic reply sent while you are away. Nearly every one begins by announcing an absence and ends there, which tells the sender something they can do nothing with. The version that works answers a different question: what should the person do now, and who can help while you are gone.

Two sentences carry almost all the value — when you are back, and who to contact meanwhile, with that person's actual address rather than a name they then have to look up.

What an out of office message should say

• That you are away, and the date you are back — the date, not a duration.
• Whether you will be reading email at all. Vagueness here produces follow-ups.
• Who to contact instead, by name and address, for the things you normally handle.
• A different contact for anything genuinely urgent, if that differs.
• What will happen to their message: read on return, or not at all if it will be buried.
• Nothing else. No apology paragraph, no promotional line, no explanation of where you are going.

Naming a colleague without asking them is the small rudeness that makes these messages resented. Agree the cover before you set the reply, tell that person what to expect, and keep the list of who covers what somewhere the team can see — the arrangement is not obvious from outside. Keep it consistent with the email signature so the named contact is the same in both.

Two versions, not one

Most mail clients let you set separate replies for people inside and outside your organisation, and the two audiences need different things. Colleagues need the cover arrangement and can be told plainly that you will not be reading anything. Customers and suppliers need a route to a person who can act, and rather less detail about your holiday.

The external version is also the one that leaks. Absence notices have been used for social engineering — knowing that the finance manager is away for two weeks is useful to somebody attempting a payment redirection — so keep the external reply short, avoid stating why you are away, and avoid naming the whole chain of people covering.

Setting it up properly

1. Agree cover with the named person before writing anything.
2. Set both the internal and external versions, and write them differently.
3. Start it the evening before you leave rather than the morning you are back at your desk.
4. End it on the day you return, not the day after — an auto-reply still running is worse than none.
5. Give a real date rather than a duration; nobody can compute two weeks from an undated message.
6. Include one alternative address, not a list of five.
7. Turn on any equivalent on other channels people reach you through, so the redirect is consistent.
8. For a long absence, say what will happen to messages sent in the meantime.

What to leave out

Length is the main problem. Three sentences do the job; a paragraph explaining that you are attending a conference and will have limited connectivity but may check occasionally does not, because the sender still cannot tell whether to wait. Ambiguity about whether you are reading email is the single most common defect — say either that you are not, or that you will reply on a stated date.

Also leave out the personal detail. Where you are, why, and with whom is information you are broadcasting to everyone who emails you, including automated senders and people you have never met.

Volume is the problem before discipline is. Notification fatigue is cured at the source — automated traffic in its own channels, channel-wide mentions reserved for real deadlines — because personal settings put the cost on each person and decay the moment somebody is busy.

Where it is set

Ettex Mail runs mailboxes on your own domain, with an automatic reply per mailbox and separate handling for internal and external senders, so the two versions do not have to be one compromise. Shared mailboxes are usually the better answer for anything genuinely important — a team address that several people watch does not go quiet when one person is away, which removes the need for the redirect entirely.

The scheduling is simple by design: you set the reply and turn it off when you return. There is no holiday calendar integration switching it on for you, no per-sender rules, and no delegation that reroutes messages to somebody else's mailbox. Those exist in larger mail platforms; here, the auto-reply is a setting rather than a workflow.

It is one of a small set of messages worth writing once properly. Email examples for the other recurring ones — the chase, the handover, the apology — save more time collectively than any single template, and an escalation matrix is what the message should point at when the matter genuinely cannot wait.

Give the return date, say plainly whether you are reading anything, name one person who agreed to cover — and turn it off the day you are back.