Out of Office is one of those weird email features that (a) has hyper usage by certain kinds of professionals (where, say, professional courtesy is a reply within max half a day, and OOO will be set even for public holidays) and (b) for everyone else, sits on that line between kinda lame and actually super helpful.
I’m in the latter camp, and setting my email OOO is an important anxiety reliever when I go away.
Auto reply is one of those features that I don’t think I’ve ever used. It’s not important to me and I actually prefer enforcing the idea that email is an async communication style. While I prefer to respond fairly quickly to email, I do not promise it nor do I expect anyone else to.
I also get it. Lawyers don’t have that luxury, as part of their service is typically fast replies and the work can be important and time-sensitive. But I’ve never really thought of how it’s anxiety relief for some folks, and I can respect that, too.
Matt’s idea here is to get AI in the loop, essentially doing smarter categorization. Drafting responses for the most common stuff and alerting for emails that seem to need it. I don’t think I personally need that right now, but I get it.
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