out-of-office

[#1]

Is there any way of setting up an automated 'out of office' reply while I'm on holiday?
And is it a good idea to do so, given that there's a fair amount of spam email around?
Thks
A

[#2]

It can't be done at the Plusnet end, you'd have to do it at your end which means leaving a PC on with a mail client running that provides such a feature.

[#3]

It can be a problem. I left the office about 9am on Friday morning not expecting to come back in and being out on Monday too put an out-of-office message up to that effect.
I unknowingly then received a response email from an online directory at which I'd placed a query, which my out-of-office message replied to - which their automated service also then acknowledged - which set up a continuous loop with emails bouncing back and forth!
Fortunately I unexpectedly returned to the office about 2pm, five hours later, to find 540 emails in my inbox! I turned out the out-of-office to break the chain.
However because we have a bespoke email client that, intentionally but annoyingly, won't permit you to delete emails in batches, I then had to individually delete all those 540 emails! Really tedious!

[#4]

Your mail client is broken (in two places).
Automated 'out-of-office' responses should be rate limited, usually to one response per sender address for a given time period, to avoid this kind of situation occuring.
Mathew

[#5]

Thanks - I know - try telling that to the software development company that wrote the software. And it happened several years ago when we were running Outlook too.

[#6]

It's a rare opportunity to say something like this, but even Outlook behaves properly in this respect! 
Mathew