Out of office

[#1]

You must have quite a few customers who have used email in a corporate environment for many years, but who are now retired.
I miss the ability to set up an autoreply (eg if I am on holiday). If you look at facilities like that you could, with appropriate promotion, be the email provider of choice for retired business people.
Of course, the autoreply facility should work not just for email addressed to force9 or plusnet domains, but also email addressed to domains that you host for your clients. I am an Outlook user, but would be quite happy to use web mail to set up the autoreply message and to switch it on and off.
PS my impression is the Squirrelmail performs better than your previous offering.
Regards, Ron McLaren

[#2]

There is a security risk for this sort of thing especially if you are retired like me. If you auto reply you are on holiday or away its an open invitation for criminal to pop around and help them selves. As a Home Watch coordinator the Police advise people not to do this its not so bad at work to say your off but from home its a bad idea

[#3]

Before migrating to PN I was with Claranet. They do have an email auto-reply facility, but then they are predominantly a business ISP.
As a residential user I never considered using the facility, for the reasons Samuria outlined.

[#4]

Ditto.
However RoundCube is replacing SquirrelMail at some point, I don't know if that has that functionality.

[#5]

Didn't think about the security bit - a good point. Can't see that PN would give this priority given the current webmail situation.
The OP could route his messages via gmail as this does have the facility required.

[#6]

there is another reason not to do it, you will be replying to all the rubbish spams as well and acknowledging that yours is a valid address

[#7]

Much safer to leave your machine on at home, and use rules to send the response to only people listed in your contacts.
That way you can be sure to let people know who you know and trust, but not alert anybody else you don't know.
Of course, this all depends on whether you are comfortable leaving your machine on whilst you are away. (You could set it to start up every evening at say, 6pm, retrieve any new messages, and send any replies needed, then shut down again until the following day.)

[#8]

Many of my customers are small businesses - too small to run their own mailservers - and recently I have had several requests for an "out-of-office" message service.  Currently the only way they can achieve this is by leaving their PCs running with email clients open, timed collection of emails and a rule set to respond with an OOO message, and largely they are (understandably) reluctant to do this if they are away for any length of time.  If this service could be added to SquirrelMail it would provide a beautifully neat solution for them.
I appreciate that I could be asking a lot here but there is a genuine and significant demand for this.  I have also come across other mailhosts who have included this in their webmail services.
You would make a lot of PN customers very happy bunnies if this could be considered.   
EDIT:  Sorry peeps, didn't see there was another thread about this until after I'd posted this. 

[#9]

jim:post merged mod:end

[#10]

Consider this:
A spammer uses your email address to send their emails.  They send it to an address that has a problem delivering to, and bounces it back to you. (backscatter).
If you have an OOO message set up.. what happens next?
Answers on a postcard...
B.

[#11]

How about this - actually happened where I worked.
A user set up a forward from his email account to his home email and then it reached the mailbox size limit - so a bounce back was created which was then forwarded to his home email and you can imagine the result - it actually killed the company email system until the IT bods could sort it out.

[#12]

Quote from: Barry

Answers on a postcard...

At least that would be easier than sorting out the mess!

[#13]

OOO message facilities have improved a lot since then - normally they are configured to respond once only to each incoming email address for each period that they are enabled.  VPOP3 in particular has this facility which gets over that possible problem completely.