The vacation reply said, “I am gone.” I was sitting there waiting for it.
I had sent an outside message from Gmail to my Beatport account, where the mail host generated the automatic response. I tested it again with different subjects and addresses. Another employee's real out-of-office notice also arrived that day, which helped confirm what the feature looked like when it was being used for its actual purpose.
An automatic reply is a small service until it starts replying to another automatic service, misses outside senders, or fails without telling anybody. Then it becomes a mail-operations problem. The test needed to confirm the trigger, the response path, the message content, and the difference between an internal message and one coming from the public internet.
The work fit the larger pattern of my first weeks at Beatport. I had checked IMAP, direct delivery, shared addresses, mailing lists, the queue, external messages, and log output. The vacation responder was another branch of the same system. It depended on mail arriving correctly before it could do anything useful.
This was not the glamorous version of joining a music startup. There were no stories in these emails about artists, clubs, or a launch party. There were messages with subjects like “testt” and “tet,” sent until the behavior made sense. The company sold digital music globally, but the infrastructure still came down to ordinary pieces that had to cooperate.
I liked that work because the result was concrete. An employee could leave a useful notice. The sender received it. The original message remained available for the employee's return. If the response failed, the logs provided somewhere to start.
The test message was intentionally false. I was not gone. That was the point.
I was in the office, watching an automated system say I was away, and checking that it did so only when it should.