The other day I was showing my wife how to make an email responder. She wanted to have one that said that she was out of the office, but would return the email when she came back.

That seemed reasonable. I am used to the Microsoft Outlook "Out of Office Reply" and I was sure that Apple Mail had the same.

I looked around in the account preferences, very confident that I would find it. However, I suddenly got that sinking feeling that there might not be one. Well, I never found one and thought that perhaps I'd have to do it the old fashioned way and write a rule.

I read a post on the internet saying someone tried to use a rule to reply to emails, but found that the replies were empty. 

I decided to give it a try there on my dual core Powermac G5. I made a rule that said if my name is in the "to:" field on incoming mail, the person should get a reply with a special message. It even gave me a field where I could type this message. I typed a message and a message came up that said "Do you want to apply your rules to messages in selected inboxes?" (pictured above). I chose yes, thinking that meant that it would begin responding as soon as the next email came in. I sent one to myself to test it, thinking I might be starting an endless loop.

Well I got the email reply, and low and behold, there was no text in it at all. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed in the testing of this operating system called Leopard.

BUT, I was more disappointed when I got a strange email from a friend who inquired as to why I was sending back all the emails she had sent to me in the last month.

I thought it odd and had the disorienting feeling that one gets when one thinks his computer is acting on it's own. My wife then asked me why she was getting a bunch of emails from me with old subject lines that she wrote. 

Then I started getting some as well. I knew something was wrong.

I scrolled down my list in my very full inbox and noticed that many of my emails had reply arrows next to them. Even ones I never replied to.

Sure enough, that little box got the best of me when it asked me if I wanted to apply this rule to my mailbox. It applied the auto-responder rule I made to every email in my inbox that had me in the "to:" field. Why would someone want this? I'm sure there is a reason, but they should make it much more clear that if you click this box your rule will act very quickly and may cause you to look like a fool.

The next day I replied to many an email, explaining why my email went haywire. Some people (I may not have heard from all of them) may think I'm mad at them or something that I would send emails back "unopened" as it were. Or maybe they might think I was being obnoxious. Whatever it is. I think this is a poorly thought out feature of Apple Mail. There should be an auto-responder that works. 

Since then I have found that the .Mac account has one. This is not good enough. You shouldn't have to go to the web to for a mail client feature. That's backwards isn't it? Better yet, the responder should at least send the text that you put in it, otherwise you have people very confused when they get their message returned to them with no reply at all.