Dear absentee [General]
12:04am BST, 28 Aug 2009

Dear absentee,

Thank you for gracing me with an automated response giving me the awesome news that you are on holiday/sabbatical/raising your offspring/have left the company. I would like to reassure you that the experience was in no way diminished by the receipt of 23 similar messages from other people in reply to the same email.

I'd like to suggest some additional things that you might want to add to your away message next time you jet off to the Algarve/have a long posh-sounding holiday/get knocked up/resign/get sacked.

• If this automated away message raises any tickets in your ticketing system, then please close them. Then you might want to consider spending a fruitless time trying to work out how to filter out away messages from every email system currently known to man.
• If this away message happens to cause a mail loop, you might want to fix it before it generates, say, 500 emails.
• There's every chance, of course, that I am actually in the office and have forgotten to unset my away message. In which case, please feel free to ignore this message.
• If it's that bloody important, please phone.

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