Should holiday email be deleted?

As a contractor at Daimler, and somebody who is technical works for a German company this trend is catching on in a lot of Germany, and frankly I'm tempted to try it myself.

It solves a lot of problems in a single blow, and most problems people have with it can be answered by:

You shouldn't use your work email for that

or the opposite

You shouldn't use your personal email for that

This is a brilliant idea. A corporate email account gets lots of emails: people leaving, people joining, meeting requests, missing mobiles, cars parked wrong, fire drills, etc. Not to mention broken builds, etc.

Holiday email within work environment where there is someone else covering for you suould all be deleted. In the case of Dailmer, the out of office clearly explains that the email is going to be deleted.

> I would like, at the very least, to see a federal law forbidding more than 40 hours max

This seems like a nice sentiment but it comes across and being out of touch with the general public.

Many, people need to work more than 40 hours, pretty much anyone who works for an hourly wage that is around the minimum wage level, a week just to make ends meet. If your law is enacted you've just doomed a non negligible portion of the population to poverty.

How would you even enforce your no more than 40 hours a week? What about anyone with a small business, or a lawyer who can bill $400/hour, should he be told he can't make any more money this week?

We just ran a new gas line in our house, the plumber doing it was doing side jobs to save up for a Harley. Your law of not permitting anyone to work more than 40 hours a week seems to make the world a worse place than it is now:(

To clarify, the op said 40 hours should be the most anyone is allowed to work, no exceptions, I'm fine with a law that says no one can be force to work more than 40 hours. But limiting people to 40 hours just seems like a really bad law.

As to the email deletion, I like the idea but it seems like a nightmare from a compliance perspective:)

The biggest down side I can see is that most services only send out one out of office email. What if someone is gone for more than a few days. I"m likely to forget that they are out, or now I have to add everyone's holiday schedule and all correspondence I want them to know about, to the list of things I need to keep in my head so I can resend emails when they come back. I'm scared already:(

It depends, I think there are probably a reasonable number of automated processes that could be messed up by something like this. For example, reminders that you need to do some sort of training or HR process could get black holed; creating a larger problem in the long run (e.g., instead of doing it at your leisure you have to do it in a big rush).

That isn't something that falls under your "you shouldn't use your work email for that", and it may be an acceptable trade-off; but it is certainly something that could cause pain. Probably not as much pain as the number of emails you'd wade through anyway, but something to consider.

I think this is misguided and would seem to reinforce bad practices, poor etiquette and bad culture.

bad practices, i.e. if you want work life balance, don't check your email when you aren't in the office. Manage your co-workers expectations that you won't be replying when you aren't on the clock, don't work for a boss that has the expectation that you are functionally on-call at times when you should be with your family and friends.

bad etiquette, i.e. stop sending so much email yourself and stop responding to email that doesn't merit a response. OOO messages and other auto-responders are vile and just add to the mess - calendar requests, project updates, FYIs, CC"s, etc. Most of this messaging traffic is just unnecessary and only adds to the weight of one's inbox without making much of a contribution. Deal with your messaging in your app - turn off the notifications and update options and actually log into your calendar once or twice a day to view requests. Same goes for the rest of your web apps (I'm thinking of project and task tools like Asana, et al).

bad culture, i.e. be part of the solution, tell people when their email practices are dysfunctional. We have this thing at our office where staff will send out an email to 10 people asking "when is a good time to get together?" which triggers an avalanche of 25 messages all with conflicting instructions and requests about what might be the best time. I actively ask people to use my calendar and ignore the rest of the email on the subject. People are slowly starting to use my calendar for this sort of thing. Same goes for after-hours email. If you don't want people to think you'll respond after-hours, don't send email after hours! In the most extreme cases, if you can't change culture, then find a better place to work. Life is too short.

Corporate policy along the lines of "delete email while you are on vacation" just serve to reinforce all of these other bad practices. Email can be a force for good, you just have to use it that way.