Lifehacker has some fairly spirited discussion surrounding a post suggesting that the best way to deal with email over vacation is to send an auto-response to the sender and automatically delete the original message. From one of their readers:
“I’m going on email-less vacation for a week and already I’m dreading the mountain of messages I’ll face when I return. I’m toying with the idea of setting up a filter that auto-responds to messages while I’m on vacation saying that the sender should email me again, after I get back, if they need a response. Then delete the message automatically.”
As several commenters on the post noted, this is highly irresponsible and probably not the best move professionally. I’ve said it before, if you aren’t managing your email effectively you’re not being fair to your customers, your co-workers or yourself.
For those of you returning from summer breaks, try using ClearContext IMS for some vacation email triage instead.