Snow Forecast e-mails and Out-of-Office replies

Ski Holiday Soon? Use e-mail? PLEASE READ THIS!

If you're heading off on holiday soon, and are likely to use an Out-of-Office facility, or autoresponder, to reply to e-mails in your absence - please, please, please be careful what you include.

Every time we send out our Snow Report e-mails, we get a few hundred "Out-of-Office" replies back to us.

Some of these contain a lot of personal information. Regularly we will be told :-

- The exact dates that someone will be on holiday.
- Who we should call in their absence (names and numbers).
- Details of Teams and Project structures.
- Personal e-mails by which people can be contacted instead.
- Personal mobile and landline numbers.

We've even had a few where we're asked to post hard-copy to a personal address!

Now that information is safe with us (we rapidly delete them) but those Out-of-Office replies will be going out to every scammer who manages to get a dodgy e-mail past your spam filters (you do use spam filtering software don't you???).

Be careful with your identity! Once it's out there it's out of your control.

Admin wrote:
Be careful with your identity! Once it's out there it's out of your control.

You're not wrong, just ask Jezza :wink: