Out of office replies can get out of hand. I witnessed a case where someone late on a Friday night, set their OoO on, with a very helpful message, then just before leaving for home on a long weekend, though he'd better send off a message to someone in my client's customer service department. Who had also set an OoO reply on. Both people turned off their computer, picked up their coats, walked out the door and had a happy long weekend.
While they were busy relaxing, the mail servers were busy sending email. The first message sent to our client caused our customer service person's out of office reply, which was sent back to the originator, who sent an out of office reply, which came back to our customer service person, who sent an out of office reply, who sent back ... .... you can see what's happening. When we all came into the office on Tuesday there were over a hundred thousand messages and the mail server was stopped for having no disk space. And so was the other person's. No email in or out to either organisation. That was probably enough to give the network admins heartburn. But as soon as they started deleting all those thousands of OoO replies, more came flooding in because they'd been backed up at servers along the chain from one person to the other. And while they were working that out, everyone else was coming into the office and calling them complaining that they had no email in over the weekend and did that mean the server was down? And what should they do about it? And why cant they start work because there is no email? Etc etc. Sorry - had nothing whatever to do with web standards, but I chuckled about that for months and I was just reminded about it. Thought you might be amused too. If not.. sorry. Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP Webworks http://afpwebworks.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ben Bishop Sent: Saturday, 31 July 2004 2:22 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WSG] Ikon, where are you? Hi Ted, This reply is recognition of your post, though the message is for all list members: Yes, "Out of Office" are annoying. This one particularly, as the automated response was sending back to the list. Usually they're set to reply to the original poster. [snip] ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
