posted by
azrael
on Sunday August 17 2014, @11:25PM
from the delete-all-out-of-hours-emails-too dept.
from the delete-all-out-of-hours-emails-too dept.
Sure, you can set an out-of-office auto-reply to let others know they shouldn't email you, but that doesn't usually stop the messages; you may still have to handle those urgent-but-not-really requests while you're on vacation. That's not a problem if you work at Daimler, though. The German automaker recently installed software that not only auto-replies to email sent while staff is away, but deletes it outright. If there's a meltdown at the workplace, you may not have to deal with it at all. The move affects about 100,000 employees, so it's clearly going to make an impact.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Daimler's Solution for Annoying Out-of-Office Email: Delete it
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 16 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday August 17 2014, @11:34PM
Why keep an email that can't be replied to in a timely fashion?
Its just setting the company or the division up for trouble from lawsuits and "discovery" (or what ever the German legal system calls that) to archive this stuff.
If it was important the sender will email back, and or contact someone else. Why leave it laying around for a month or two, opening the company up for lawsuits because they failed to act when warned of a significant safety issue or something.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18 2014, @12:27AM
> Its just setting the company or the division up for trouble from lawsuits and "discovery" to archive this stuff.
You can be sure that they already have an email (non)retention policy just for that purpose, unofficially of course because if it were official that would be destruction of evidence. Binning email while you are on vacation isn't going to be much of an improvement over that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Leebert on Monday August 18 2014, @06:20AM
Actually, you have that backwards. If you have a retention policy and are deleting based on that retention policy, you're (generally) cool. If you're deleting OUTSIDE of that retention policy, there might be issues.
See: https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/protect/retention [eff.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Sunday August 17 2014, @11:41PM
A decent percentage of my email falls in 2 categories: stuff that keeps me up to date on things (like PDF user's guides for devices I'll be writing drivers for when I get back; and stuff I probably will never read but file away and search when I'm looking for something.
I'm perfectly capable of deciding which email needs to be deleted, in no case is it 100% of my email. Unless I'm dead (or fired (or both as I plan to be cremated)).
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cafebabe on Sunday August 17 2014, @11:57PM
Ignoring background notification messages which can be searched at leisure, it would be nice close a mailbox to new messages during absence. Unfortunately, this may not work in practice. If the sender is notified about a deleted message then this could escalate. For example, mail servers receiving a template response or an SMTP 5.5.x response could keep retrying. At best, messages would arrive in a flood when you return. However, with retry attempts becoming less frequent, it is more likely to tickle in after significant delay.
Overall, this interacts badly with the expectations of senders and receivers - and that assumes it doesn't create an arms race.
1702845791×2
(Score: 3, Informative) by kaszz on Monday August 18 2014, @01:56AM
There are special SMTP headers to deal with this. It's an very old issue already solved.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by cafebabe on Sunday August 17 2014, @11:43PM
I remember overhearing a conversation between two IBM employees circa 1997. Apparently, one of their colleagues went on holiday. When he returned, he deleted all of his email and sent departmental message saying that if anyone had anything important, they should send it again. His colleagues thought it was an audacious move.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by carguy on Monday August 18 2014, @02:01AM
I worked for an interesting prof when I was an undergrad (pre-email). He had a heart attack and was out for 6-8 weeks. The first day he came back, I happened to be in his office. There was a pile of mail (mostly interdepartmental) which he summarily threw in the trash. I never heard that there were any consequences from this "clean start".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18 2014, @05:41PM
They guy had a heart attack! I don't think he really cares about old mail. I sure as hell would not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 18 2014, @02:02AM
I worked with a dude who did this. He would say 'if its important they will ask again as they knew I was on vacation my email program told them'
I use a similar system. I empty my email 'inbox' box just before I leave. Then when I get back I scan thru it and see if there is anything I need to act on. 99.99999% of the time I delete all of it. I use the done/not done approach to email.
Honestly its a good excuse to get caught back up with what is going on and goof off for 2-3 hours. As I get about 100 per day. A 5 day vacation is a decent amount of email.
(Score: 4, Informative) by evilviper on Monday August 18 2014, @01:42AM
It's nonsense to give Daimler credit for this. This is a wave going across Europe. Laws are being changed so that if an employee does ANY work during their vacation, even voluntarily doing trivial things like checking or responding to e-mail, it counts as a work day, and doesn't meet the requirements for 20+ days of mandatory forced vacation every year.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Monday August 18 2014, @02:15AM
This is awesome! I wonder when the rest of the world will follow suit. I betcha middle management will try its best to stop/delay this.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday August 18 2014, @11:15PM
Middle management are the ones most likely to benefit from a ban on email outside of "office hours".
I know more than one middle manager whose smartphone ended up at the bottom of a swimming pool on holiday.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday August 18 2014, @02:27AM
As usual. Money talks..! :D
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 18 2014, @11:53AM
I wonder if this will result in an increase in total email flow?
Locally we use email as our trouble ticketing system (we have at least three others, very carefully curated to act as a source of good metric results not for actual troubleshooting) and we use email as what amounts to a wiki replacement because none of the non-technical users can be bothered with real wiki / CMS sites we have. And we use it as a spam delivery service "Its employee appreciation day tomorrow (last week friday, although I won't get the email until next week monday) and carrot cake will be available in the cafeteria between noon and 1 pm". We also use email for to do list work, again because we have a "real" tool for that task but thats only for metric generation purposes and pencil whipping, not real use.
If you randomly delete incoming email that will be "worked around" my simply sending even more emails for all the above categories. So a policy that whoever is working on a problem needs to forward it to someone working the next day who will spam everyone. And another policy to spam spam spam multiple days with any wiki-type documentation to make sure everyone gets at least one copy. HR will send "casual day" notifications and similar spam every single day for a month before diversity celebration day to make sure everyone gets at least one copy. Finally we'll implement something like human operated TCP protocol to make sure todo lists are synced up. Equaling an explosive growth in email volume.
(Score: 2) by monster on Monday August 18 2014, @01:41PM
Wasn't spam already +90% of email traffic? Even sending all legitimate mail again would be just a 10% increase in traffic, and this scheme is only for vacations, so much less.