I think autoforwarding emails is a bad idea in general but when put in the hands of stupid people its even worse.

I come from an IT background and have quite an unfortunate reputation in my police staff job as being able to sort anything. Whilst its nice to be apreciated at the same time its a mega pain in the arse, especially when you have just been given a huge task by the inspector to be completed in a rediculously short timescale you get a phone call from someone in another office you never heard off... "Hi is that vic?" "I was told you can help with the compuer, its not working correctly".

Now my role isnt IT bassed anyway, I have some admin rights in respect to my office to get things changed without bugging IT as I'm trusted not to bugger it up, but in the whole if it is an actuall problem I cant do anything anyway. Normally though its not a problem and someones just clicking on the wrong button so I help out.

Back to autoforwarding I get a sergeant come in a bit flustered, one of his old team members has been moved to a new acting sergeant and his having trouble with them. I know the acting sergeant and I have to say he is definatly a waste of a good uniform. Now this team member is on annual leave for a week and before he went he sent a list of things the A/PS has done to annoy him and some being quite blunt as in "he sits on his arse doing fuck all". So his old PS has had a word with the inspector about all the trouble and inspectors looking into it so he replied to say its being looked into including the officers original email.

In comes the out of office reply "I am away until xxx this email has been autoforwarded to A/PS xxx"

Now the his old PS is shitting a brick and wants to know how to delete the email. Our systems do have a pull back system for emails but it dont work when forwarded, pulling it back would only delete the original sent to the officer, not the copy forwarded to the A/PS.

Me personally, I'd never autoforward my emails, but to send out an email the day before you go on holiday with that sort of content then setting up your emails to forward to the person your talking about is just plain dumb.