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28/04/08 Communication: Kill Email Autoreplies.
SINGAPORE - Today, I got this autoreply from my Blackberry account manager (they’ve charged me someone else’s bill for 4 months now)…
“I’m now away on annual leave. I appreciate that with [Mobile Operator's] mobile working solutions and global network you can contact me just about anytime, anywhere. However, in my absence if you need a swift response you may wish to contact us on [XXX XXXX XXXX].”
Even worse (no names, but, I got this after commenting on a blog today) are people who compose this type of stuff…
“If your mail is important, then please resend it again after my return date.”
That reads, “I know you already shipped me that parcel but I wasn’t in. Look, I can’t be bothered going to the post office to collect it so just send me another one.”
Setting an autoreply to tell people you’re not actually checking the mail address you’ve given them is like getting stood up on a date (never happened me, once she was 1.5 hours late - but that doesn’t count). You go to all that effort to write a long email about something that is time sensitive like asking advice on how not to get stood up on your date tonight. 1 hour later you proudly press send. 0.5sec later you have a new message in your inbox “Out Of Office [Autoreply] - I’ll be back on the 28th May. Apologies.” - you’re gutted, an hour of hard graft wasted.
So who’s going to kill it? Who’s gonna build a killer email service that first before you start typing, checks the status of the recipient. If the person is ‘out of office’ tell me first, even better, make the out of office date machine-readable and let me schedule my message to be automatically sent on the day after the day they return.
Gmail could easily implement this between gmail users - when I mark myself as away it should put a little palm tree or sun umbrella beside my name in their contacts drop down. Easy!
-Robin.
(Image Credit: ‘Ting’ my good friend guided me around this Temple last weekend in Taipei, Taiwan. By Author.)
Tags: autoreplies, communication, Email, kill
1 Comment
We need robust widespread presence services. Reluctant though I am to praise stuff from MSFT, I quite like Microsoft Office Communicator. That tells me when when colleagues are available, busy, in meetings, on the phone - or on leave. Would that it were the same for people outside the office.
I think it was @ChrisBrogan who used folk’s Twitter postings to determine of they were about or not…
One colleague used to sent an out of office *telling* people their mail had been deleted unread, and could they resend it when he was back. Shame when he missed a pay review because of it.
As you say, Gmail could do this. GoogleTalk/Pandion can exchange status messages - my son once asked me how long I was making coffee for when I forgot to change my status message.
