How to write a great out-of-office reply

 “I will be back in the office [in two weeks] and have limited Wi-Fi connection in the meantime.” It is safe to assume that readers of this column are familiar with something like this message (which, like all the others cited below, comes from real life). As with all aspects of office culture, the autoreply has evolved over time—and more quickly in the past 18 plague months. Good etiquette has not always kept up.

The precursor of the electronic “out of office” is sometimes found in Mediterranean countries, where a handwritten note taped to a shop front announces to the world: “Closed for August, back in September”. The digital autoreply was initially a quirk of Microsoft, a software giant, dating back to the company’s Xenix email system of the late 1980s, before bleeding into the mainstream in the following two decades.