This is the time of year when people take off for vacations. Many email services offer the opportunity to leave a “vacation message”. It does sound like the polite thing to do – let others know you will be away and may not respond promptly too their emails. However, think carefully before you take this step. Do you subscribe to any listservs?
Here is what can happen (see below). An email is sent to you from the listserv and your email system follows your request and sends your vacation message back. The server may interpret this vacation message as a submission and send the message out to all members of the list which would of course include you. Which results in an email arriving in your inbox which results in a vacation message being sent back to the server, etc. etc.
Back when I learned to program I had to learn to essentially hit the “kill switch” for those times in which I put my computer into an infinite loop. If you are the culprit in this listserv problem you do not have access to the kill switch, but trust me every member of the list will soon recognize your name.
