How is that Cory Arcangel's dystopian possibility isn't realized all the time?
While Sommer was away on vacation, a friend of ours emailed the both of us and a dozen other people about plans for a party. I, and I assume everyone on else on the thread, received Sommer's automatic out-of-the-office response. No problem. But if another person had set up his email to reply automatically, would we be stuck in the dread loop?
Posted by Kriston at April 8, 2008 5:34 PMYou, sir, clearly do not work in an office every day. The things I've seen...
Yeah, it can happen. It isn't that likely to, however, because autoresponders (except maybe really bad ones) generally only reply to the sender, not to everyone cc'ed on the email. So you probably only got the reply when you hit 'reply all' yourself.
But for mailing lists it can be a real problem, as any post to the list will trigger an "I'm on vacation!" email that then gets circulated to the list. And if the list is set to send copies of a user's email to that user, it can create a loop. Fortunately mailing list software usually has defaults designed to prevent this, or code to stop it, or administrators who can take action.
Posted by: Tom at April 8, 2008 6:27 PMEmail programs are only supposed to send one vacation notice per recipient. If you email your friend again you shouldn't get another vacation notice until the next time they disarm and rearm the option.
Posted by: Hovie at April 8, 2008 6:47 PMunless you accidentally set the away message to "respond to all messages," when it then will respond to every single message in your inbox. which sometimes numbers in the thousands. meaning people who have emailed you, say, 200 times will get 200 of the same away message.
not that that has ever happened to me before.
Posted by: the g at April 9, 2008 10:46 AM