Volkswagen Turns Off E-mail After Work-Hours

wired_parrot writes "Responding to complaints from employees that email outside of working hours was disrupting their lives, Volkswagen has taken the step of shutting their email servers outside work-hours. Other companies have taken similar steps, with at least one taking the extraordinary step of banning internal e-mail altogether. Is this new awareness of the disruption work email brings on employee's personal life a trend?"

WHAT?!

[betterunixthanunix]

Here I was thinking that we were supposed to be connected to our jobs 24x7, accepting calls and emails after hours at no extra pay:

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/02/1350229/us-senator-proposes-bill-to-eliminate-overtime-for-it-workers [slashdot.org]

Oh, wait, Volkswagen is not an American company. Carry on then, respecting your workers and whatever it is that you foreigners do...

Re:Turn off sync

[0123456]

I've read that to be efficient you should download and check your email no more than a couple of times per day. Have time set aside 1st thing in am, noon, and late afternoon to read and deal with it, and don't let it pop up, speak or distract you the rest of the day.

If you ignore your email then people start phoning you, which is far more distracting.

Volkwasgen

[sunderland56]

Apparently they turned off spell checking as well.

Re:This is idiotic.

[Minwee]

If Volkswagen is turning off the email servers, I can't even do that. I actually have to wait to send the email until they are working

Um, they're not turning off _your_ mail server, they're just turning off their own.

Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, cavemen using primative SMTP servers fashioned from stone knives, bear skins and RFC 821 figured out how to store and forward email, and if the remote server was not available then to try again later. If your SMTP service is unable to deliver mail despite transient errors then please contact your network administrator about it.

If you are your network administrator, but have misconfigured your mail server, there is no need for ritual suicide. You can cleanse yourself of most of the shame by reading the appropriate documentation and fixing the problem.

Re:No surprise, it's Germany

[assertation]

Are you accepting American immigrants?