Should you delete all emails you get while you are on holiday?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23547802

by petenixey • 13 years ago

43 36 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

rotub• 13 years ago

Personally I like this idea. If it's urgent it will come up again on return

martin-adams• 13 years ago

But not necessarily if it's important

ww520• 13 years ago

This is a good way to deal with emails while vacationing. I've often tempted to just delete all emails after a vacation. The rational being that if it's important, they will send it again. This sounds like a better approach. Let them know ahead of time that emails during the time will be gone for good. They can send again after the vacation if it's important for you to read.

gabemart• 13 years ago

1) Wouldn't it be more correct to bounce all emails with an appropriate message, rather than accept and then delete them?

2) I would be worried about automatically generated emails getting deleted. I guess this depends on the type of email you receive, but if you ever receive important emails generated by a machine, any kind of auto-delete feature seems unwise.

jhandl3• 13 years ago

"This is your bank/IRS. There's a problem with you account/taxes. If you don't respond by date X we'll close/fine your account/you. This is the only notice you will get."

tobiasu• 13 years ago

Not legal in sane jurisdictions. There is no guaranteed delivery of email. Important stuff still needs to be sent by confirmed fax, or snail mail with various options to confirm delivery to the recipient.

Too• 13 years ago

Where do you draw the "important"-line? Most my (important) bills come in my snail mail mailbox without any confirmation to the sender. If i don't pay them on time i get a delay fine. What's easier, pay the fine or try to prove in court that you never received the invoice? Or worse, explaining that you threw out all the mail you received during holidays?

Still, I agree, important messages through email should always be replied to to confirm that you've got them.

patio112• 13 years ago

Neither banks nor the IRS use email for that. You know who does? Rackspace, which sent me a pair of emails recently informing me of tickets they had opened which I should probably look at. It turns out if you don't respond to an Acceptable Use Policy violation they'll turn off your servers and close your account.

They sent one reminder, which I also missed. By happiest of coincidences, I logged into their ticketing system to look up a Linux command a support rep had taught me once, and saw the tickets.

(The AUP violation was a server getting hacked, probably via a WordPress blog, and being used to attack SSH on other servers. I nearly had a heart attack, until I realized "Hey wait, that is not actually an IP I own." Turns out they had the wrong account. "Sorry about the mistake!" I don't think that would have cut it, honestly, if they had actually gone through on the deactivation threat.)

jhandl3• 13 years ago

Banks do use email for that and for everything else if you told them to do so because you care for the environment.

OrsenPike• 13 years ago

I have pretty much always done this for mail I am just CC'd on while on holiday for more than a couple of days. I don't auto delete email sent just to me though. Works well and makes the return to the office a simpler task. Anything I need to know about I am told about or copied in on the messages that are important on my return. Much easier than going through 3,000+ emails in the morning all the while getting told about the important things anyway.

mosselman• 13 years ago

This seems like a valid approach, though in some cases it isn't very useful. In some cases you get notes on meetings, etc. Lets assume that all of your company's meetings are fruitful (haha) you'd maybe want the notes on the last 2 meetings you missed. You can replace 'meeting' here with some other important announcement.

It would go a bit far to let some employee somewhere keep track of who has and has not received which announcements yet.

Then again, one might wonder if e-mail is a valid medium for things like announcements. Maybe a sort of in-house social network like at Deutsche Bank (and other companies) is more suited for this purpose.

eksith2• 13 years ago

There was a time I deleted my emails while away from work, but after one particular incident, I swore never to do it again.

I had gone to visit my folks and while away, an old friend had sent me an email, which I deleted along with my regular cleanup. I came back to discover he had passed away (aged 26) and the last message he sent was to me along with an image of him in hospital. He had made arrangements with his family and we had access to all his accounts, including email, and the photo itself was still on his phone. So the message wasn't lost forever. But what if he hadn't?

After that, I decided to never delete anything unless I confirm it's of no further use.

In fact, every message I've ever received, except for spam, has been backed up on a local server, my laptop and the desktop as well as external USB(4) for the last 2 years or so.

I doubt something like that will happen again, but some things don't feel trivial though still intangible. Besides, storage is cheap (if we're not talking hi-res images/video).

mariuolo• 13 years ago

That's why most people keep separate account for work and personal messages.

eksith2• 13 years ago

People don't always follow categories like that. I have quite a few addresses, but he sent it to the one he remembered to type in and hoped I got it. I did, but didn't keep it.

jacquesm• 13 years ago

I'm categorically against deleting any email. Email is a track record, a way to prove stuff, a way to disprove stuff.

Deleting email can sometimes be construed as destruction of evidence. And having email can sometimes win you court cases.

The only kind of email I delete is spam, everything else gets archived. Just a heads up, in case anybody wants to send me self-incriminating email :)

norswap• 13 years ago

Say you delete it, then don't. Or just say it will be automatically archived and you won't read it.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Deleting email can sometimes be construed as destruction of evidence.

From what I know, the way this is addressed is through policy. For example, company sets policy of retaining 3 months of email. Company follows this policy. Then, email that is deleted that is more than 3 months old, is not considered destruction of evidence.

Anyway, there's too much stuff that isn't spam but has only momentary utility to keep everything. For example, automated notices are usually very high volume and always no longer useful within 12 hours.

panacea• 13 years ago

The intent is 'your email will be marked as read / archived' not really "deleted". It's not possible to delete email. The NSA has it for one.

dhughes• 13 years ago

Deleting email can sometimes be construed as destruction of evidence. And having email can sometimes win you court cases.

We have annual training on PIPA and FOI (Canada) and it's stressed any e-mail, written notes or any form of recording are fair game for anyone to request seeing. Even blank lines on a notepad should have a line and initialed, all pages should be numbered sequentially.

You can destroy notes and delete e-mail in fact it's probably a good idea since the less ammunition there is the safer you are.

hackula12• 13 years ago

Email is the best CYA tool ever invented. After a call with a client, I type up the summary, email it to them, and ask them to confirm the contents. I started doing this religiously a few years ago and it has saved me countless times. "I didn't say I wanted that feature!! I told you the opposite"... CC:Subject:'looks great!'

vacri• 13 years ago

You don't have to delete your email to 'not look at the backlog'. Just siphon it off to a different folder.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Never delete email. Never. Archive, of course, but never delete.

I have been in, and involved in, too many cases where old emails have been crucial evidence in both minor and major ways, personally and professionally.

House keep, tidy, archive. But always have them ultimately available. Never delete.

I'd say the same about paper work. Advantage with email is that its easier to manage and store.

harrytuttle• 13 years ago

I did this for years. From ccmail, to mbox, to maildir, to exchange.

Then one day I just deleted it all. I haven't missed it since. I keep my inbox at zero. Everything goes into tickets and is actioned or is saved as a document if required still and the rest goes in the bin.

In fact its been better for me. Less stress, less crap to backup, less worrying about losing stuff, less window of opportunity if someone manages to root my kit.

The best thing is that I've worked out things can wait.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Fair enough. Your choice.

Cant say I have ever found it hard or time consuming to let email automatically archive. It just does it.

m_c• 13 years ago

I provide a code word in my out of office message so that people can flag things they want me to read but don't want to remember to resend in a few week's time. e.g.

I'm away until dd/mm and will not be checking email. If you would like me to take action on or note something when I return please resend with [Action] in the subject line. All other messages will be automatically archived.

robomartin• 13 years ago

Vacation? What's that.

Really, it isn't that hard to quickly scan emails while on a trip. No need to reply. If you are running a business you have no choice. And, again, it really isn't that hard. Part of it, in my opinion, is to systemize. For all of my business email I use Outlook exclusively. I have twenty years of cleand-up email (no spam, notices, etc) archived. This database has come in handy at times. The key is organization. I have extensive filters and even custom VBA code in place to organize and systemize email. I also run multiple instances of Outlook simultaneously, one per business, each with it's own separate pst file.

Incoming email gets sorted into relevant folders. For example, email from employees, vendors, customers and hosting providers go into their own folders, sometimes with additional granularity.

Stuff that is OK to delete --like notices-- goes into folders that get flushed out every ninety days.

I also sort email into an "Unknown Sources" folder: If the sender isn't in my address book they are an unknown source.

This and a few other tweaks makes it easy to manage email for more than one business without having to spend tons of time manually sorting and parsing. I have never in my life used automatic vacation response emails and can't remember any instance of wishing I had.

Again, this is from the perspective of an entrepreneur. I know some of my employees completely turn all company comms off during vacation. And that's OK.

test-it• 13 years ago

That's very nice, but realistically 99.9999% of people won't put this amount of effort into their email.

steven2012• 13 years ago

10 years ago, one of the architects I worked with had an email message that stated "I'm on vacation, and when I return, I will delete all emails I receive during this time. If it's important, then please e-mail me when I return on X." And he meant it. He really did delete everything and didn't bother reading a single e-mail. If something really did need his attention, then people would be motivated to contact him, and if some decision was made without his input, then it didn't matter.

This is what happens when people get 200-300 emails a day, and I don't really know of a better way to deal with it, rather than going through thousands of emails when you return from a 2 week vacation.

hackula12• 13 years ago

200-300 emails per day sounds like you need a better spam filter. If not that, then an assistant or two. No one important enough to get 200 meaningful emails per day should be spending their time reading most of it. Hire a VA and get them to do it for ~10-15 dollars an hour and put a summary on your desk.

kennu• 13 years ago

I often receive invitations to meetings that will take place after my vacation, so it would seem pretty silly and arrogant to just delete them. And of course there's a lot of other similar mail; small pieces of information that will be relevant after the vacation.

Should you delete all emails you get while you are on holiday?

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