Daimler Allows Employees to Delete all Incoming Emails When on Vacation

Car manufacturer Daimler are trying to make their employee’s holidays a little more stress-free. They’ve opted in the ability to remove the general “out of office reply” for a much simpler task – deleting every incoming email throughout the whole duration of their leave. The program is adequately named their “Mail On Holiday” option.

The New York Times reported:

“The program, called Mail on Holiday, politely informs senders that their messages were instantly deleted, but they can contact a designated alternate worker if necessary. The email blackout is optional for the company’s 100,000 workers, but “the response is basically 99 percent positive,” a Daimler spokesman, Oliver Wihofszki, told BBC Radio. “Everybody says, ‘That’s a real nice thing.'”

With some basic mail knowledge, you could do something similar yourself – just set a rule to send all incoming mail to your trash as it arrives in your inbox, shame if someone has something very important to contact you about however.

According to Daimler this is a bid to promote a healthier holiday lifestyle for their employees – removing any opportunity for them to look at their work emails whilst resting on holiday. As the incoming emails are removed, a simple return email will be sent to the sender letting them know they should remain contact after the holiday period has ended.

I wonder what will happen if two companies with the same policy have an email sent to one another. Does it just spit automatically generated out of office emails at one another for all eternity or is there some kind of failsafe put in place for this?

What do you think of this opt-in program? It’s a good idea for employee peace of mind and certainly will make day one back in the office run quite a lot smoother, but it begs the question – what if you miss something very important?

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