Hacker News Reader

Comment by nextw33k | Hacker News Reader

Aarrrrggggggg, out of office replied are the BANE of the internet.

Its an asynchronous medium, like the postal service. Its not a conversation on the telephone. Replies are not expected to be instant. Anybody that calls you up 1 hour later to find out why you've not answered is clearly "doing it wrong"®. Use the correct tool for the job.

The guy could have stopped spamming people and just answered his emails once a month instead for the same effect.

People that claim email is a bind or that they are a slave to it should have it removed and see how they prefer life.

View on HN

Don't agree at all. Whilst it may be asynchronous, people do have an expectation of a reply within a reasonable time frame - hours to a few days depending on the relationship.

It is _incredibly_ infuriating when people are out for 2 weeks and don't alert you to this fact. You end up wasting time waiting for a repsonse when you culd have immediately sought assistance from an alternative contact.

It's not spam. It's polite and helpful.

Which is exactly fundamental to my point and to the article. You have an expectation which you are placing on other. When the author stopped trying to be synchronous with an asynchronous medium he found himself to be more productive and people were OK with that.

It turns out that the frustration you feel is the problem of someone not replying, it is you externalising your problems as other peoples fault. If you really need a response quickly pick up the phone, get a synchronous answer via a synchronous medium.

Exactly. :-)

> Whilst it may be asynchronous, people do have an expectation of a reply within a reasonable time frame - hours to a few days depending on the relationship.

Not at all, unless frequent contacts are expected in which case you should be warned through other channels.

> You end up wasting time waiting for a repsonse when you culd have immediately sought assistance from an alternative contact.

If you need fast turnaround, use a fast turnaround transport. That's what instant messengers or phones are for.

> It's not spam. It's polite and helpful.

I completely disagree, especially when the numbskull using out-of-office replies can't be arsed to turn it off for mailing lists. It's spammy, impolite and unhelpful.

Mailing lists are supposed to use priority=bulk.

Mail server are supposed not to reply to bulk email automatically.

They also should include a List-Id and mail servers are not supposed to reply automatically to those either.

>Not at all, unless frequent contacts are expected in which case you should be warned through other channels.

Obviously, this differs. At my actual job, email is the "need a response today" communication, while instant messaging or phone is "need a response now". Out-of-office messages are invaluable to know if someone is just out today, in which case things are fine, or they are out for two weeks, in which case I need to find their delegate.

"It is _incredibly_ infuriating when people are out for 2 weeks and don't alert you to this fact."

Email is a great "electronic mail" system but a miserable trouble ticketing system. None the less, just like "Excel" is the corporate standard database system, in practice email is the corporate standard ticketing system. Of course it doesn't work very well, but incorrect application of the tool, is not the fault of the tool.

The problem is using a binary vocabulary to describe something that should be on a spectrum. Just because I use an asynchronous medium doesn't mean that I don't expect a reply in a "reasonable" time, and "reasonableness" will depend on the situation and hopefully both parties are in some agreement.

Think of an asynchronous ajax call. It may be ok to wait 5 seconds, but not 5 days.

I find far more intrusive the phone call that could have been taken care of via email. I deal with this because a community service group I work with has a lot of elder people. They like to call. Yes, I understand it's Tuesday, and we have a meeting Friday, but I can answer you in two hours (by email). Don't interrupt me right now (by calling). But it can't wait two weeks.

eh, the big problem is people on mailing lists. Everyone hates out of office emails in mailing lists.

Vacation messages, when emailing individuals? Yeah, in the technical sphere, they are generally considered kinda rude. In the business sphere, the opposite. So yeah, here on hn, with a foot in both camps, eh, just make sure you don't vacation message a mailing list.

That's easy to say, but hard to actually do. As much as I hate spamming mailing lists, it's not like I'm going to spend two days carefully specifying answering rules for every autoreply message target in my Outlook that I must use at work. So, the burden of doing that properly is on Microsoft or company IT to make sure who will get the auto reply, while all user can and has to do is to tick a check box and type an actual message.

Is it really hard to do? Wouldn't it be enough to have the server always set the right MIME headers for messages from a mailing list? And then have the vacation mailer not send any out of office replies to mails from mailing lists? This sounds like a problem with a technical solution.

From the Sieve vacation RFC https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5230#page-8

   Implementations SHOULD NOT respond to any message that contains a
   "List-Id" [RFC2919], "List-Help", "List-Subscribe", "List-
   Unsubscribe", "List-Post", "List-Owner", or "List-Archive" [RFC2369]
   header field.

If your Exchange server is 2007SP1 and up, you can specify your OOF to only send to external users who are on your contacts list. That should resolve the mailing list spamming issue here.

How do you want to deal with asynchronous tasks which have to be dealt with within the day?

Synchronous communication is not a solution for that when interruptions are undesirable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com