No More Email Auto Responders

I meant to write this post a while back when I pissed off a prominent Irish blogger with email spam, totally by accident. Luckily my keyword alert radar notified me of his moaning on Twitter! What happened was, my partner was in hospital for a week and for once, I was going to be away a lot visiting her etc..Not sure if some of my clients could cope without me and because it seemed like a professional thing to do at the time, I setup a quick email auto responder to alert people to the fact that I’d not be able to get back to them as quick as I normally do.

I regularly leave comments on other forums and blogs and a lot of these sites now have automated systems which email you when someone has responded to a thread that you left a comment in. When the automated system emails you and you have your responder setup, they will get replies everytime they email you. Some comment threads can get very big so that’s a lot of automated emails flying about and you will not be liked by the forum/blog admin. I’d left a comment on this guy’s blog and he had new comment notification turned on for the thread so he got a pile of my auto responders in his inbox every time someone left a new comment!

The upside is that hopefully he will now remember my business name forever!

Here’s a few other reasons not to setup auto responders:

• If spammers know there’s a working email address they’ll spam some more,
• Sites that send out Newsletters don’t want a ton of auto responders back at them,
• No one likes getting a non personal email response.

I believe Auto responders are generally useless these days because very few people will bother to hang around until you get back from your lovely holiday to email you again. They’ll either look for a response from someone else in your company or go elsewhere. If you are a one man band kind of business like I am then you really have to check email all the time and it’s easy to do via smart phone or laptop while you’re away.