I’m just back from two weeks of holidays and one week of workshop. Normally I only set my Out of Office email saying something like.
I’m off till D Month. I’ll be come back to you as soon as I can after that day.
That kind of message doesn’t help anyone. I’m giving a false hope that I’ll reach to that email and when I’m back in the office I get overwhelmed with the large amount of emails I’ve collected while I was away.
This time, and induced by reading “A world without email” book by Cal Newport I had first decided to change the OoO message to:
I’m off till D Month. Your email has been deleted, send it again when I’ve returned.
However, while discussing the plans with a colleague who made me think on the pressure that this may put on others, I considered a different approach. This was my OoO for the last three weeks:
Hi there! I’m away enjoying my holidays (till the 20th) or at a workshop (20th-24th)!
TL;DR: Your email is safe – eventually, I’ll come back to you. You need something urgently – jump to the end of the email.
I was planning to delete any incoming email while I was away, and let you know about such actions. But a good friend has made me rethink this course of action, as doing, so I’d be putting the burden on you! What am I doing instead? Glad you’ve asked!! I’m archiving all the emails received during my time off under a special folder. When I’m back, a little program will be pulling two random emails a day into my inbox, and I commit to answer these. How long it will pass before I answer you will depend on luck and the number of emails I may have received. By doing so I’ll have a better start and don’t get overwhelmed by a large amount of things to pay attention to.
Something urgent about […]
Have a great time (I’ll make sure I’ll be doing so)!! David
PS: You can trick this system (and this is allowed!) by sending me a reply to the original email when I’m back. This way, the old email will resurface again!
I’ve received various positive comments from people who received this OoO and my Inbox is empty. So, I suppose this approach has worked well… at least till now. I checked the number of emails I’ve got in that separate folder this morning and it would take me more than 9 months to go through them. Let’s see who are the lucky ones that get replied this month.
What’s the “technical side” of this? I first attempted to do something very fancy with MS Power Automate, which allows to grab emails from your account and do a set of things. However, I got stuck with the random selection. Their email tool they have only take 25 emails and that would only benefit at those who wrote closer to my return. I also tried to come up with some spreadsheet formulae, but that also failed.
First of all I created a rule on the outlook web client. I’ve set it so that all
the emails with me in the “To” field were going to be archived in the
OnHolidays folder. The rest of emails are redirected to OnHolidaysSecondary.
I’ll be drawing random emails from the primary folder till is empty, then go to
the Secondary (which it should be less important things - I think!)
At the end, I went for a simple approach with the tools I’m more familiar: emacs
and unix tools. I’m reading my email there, so why not do the random selection
from there too? Using org-mode and the mu command I come up with the
following:
mu find -u maildir:'/OnHolidays' -f "i l" | sort | uniq | awk '{print rand()*1000000, $1, $2}' | sort | head -n 2 | awk '{print "mu4e:msgid:"$2}'
The result of that looks something like:
mu4e:msgid:VI1PR01MB5135E9E1D4A1C701E11F182FC0A39@VI1PR01MB5135.eurprd01.prod.exchangelabs.com
mu4e:msgid:AM6PR0102MB314123DDE920ACBFA727172BADA39@AM6PR0102MB3141.eurprd01.prod.exchangelabs.com
which in emacs are clickable links to that particular email on my mu4e views.
I hope this is helpful
