Out-of-Office Auto-Replies

Great. I’m starting to get flooded by out-of-office auto-replies from the AP CS mailing list again.

I keep monitoring that mailing list for mentionings of DrJava, so I can make sure we help high school teachers with potential problems. I just posted a reply, reminding a user to also install the JDK when installing DrJava. Unfortunately, it’s past the end of the semester at most institutions now, and that means that a bunch of people won’t be reading their email now.

And they think they need to tell people that they won’t be reading their email. So they set up out-of-office auto-replies that reply to every message they receive. Including posts from the mailing list they chose to subscribe to. At least the AP CS mailing list is set up to list the individual post writer as sender, and not the entire mailing list, so the auto-replies just go to me and don’t cause a vicious cycle of auto-replies to auto-replies, and so on.

Still: These people chose to subscribe to the mailing list. I’m not writing to them personally. Can’t they have the decency and foresight to unsubscribe or except the mailing list from the auto-replies? Are out-of-office auto-replies really necessary?

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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