Out of office

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An opportunity for the daring (like yours truly) to be wags, the priggish to be patronise — Dear Sender, please be advised and so on — and for the anal to clog up the word's inboxes by mysteriously contriving an automatically generated out-of-office message that replicates itself like a fruit-fly and issues in triplicate however many emails you send to the same person. At first plush this seems to require ninja outlook skills but the JC reckons it is quite the opposite: basic ignorance — and involves setting up an auto-reply as an email rule rather than as a dedicated out-of-office message.

The genuinely pedantic, of course, do both.

We suspect that these are the same folk who have never discovered their “sent items” folder, and hence cc themselves onto every email they send, just so they don’t lose it.

See also

• Dear Sender
• Farewell emails