A couple of weeks ago, before taking a few days off to attend a friend's wedding, I tried to activate the "out of office" message on my email. Half an hour later and the combination of my stupidity and some even dumber software meant I was still stuck in the office, my inbox was approaching meltdown and the nice helpdesk lady was explaining that Lotus Notes "shouldn't really have done that".

What had happened was that I had tracked down the out of office function on the tool bar, entered the dates of my holiday – 4 May to 9 May – and clicked Activate.

Unfortunately, although I changed the month to May, I failed to change the year. Therefore, the automated reply read: "I will be out of the office starting 04/05/2006 and will not return until 10/05/2007".

I'm pretty sure the system then automatically sent my out-of-office message to everyone who had sent me an email in the past year.

The result was that the start of my holiday was delayed because my inbox was swamped with bounce-back failed message notices and returning out-of-office replies from the vast swathe of people I had just inadvertently contacted. Meanwhile, countless others probably looked at their email inbox and asked "why is this idiot Murray telling me he is going to be on holiday?"

Now I'll happily accept that this episode was a result of my failure to check the dates properly. However, it does still raise the question as to who would sign off such a genuinely user-hostile feature? I know software development teams are always under pressure, but surely it is not a great imaginative leap to realise that anyone setting an automated out of office reply wants to set it from that day, rather than a date 12 months previous, and that automatically updating the start date would be a sensible feature. Equally, is it not self evident that offering anyone the freedom to retrospectively tell a whole year of email correspondents that they have been away is just plain daft?

The worrying thing for the software industry is that such user-hostile features are surprisingly common. It is not that it is too complex or costly to get these things right, just that at the planning stage there is a reluctance or inability for programmers to put themselves in the place of the user.

It is little wonder that users are increasingly giving traditional apps the cold shoulder in favour of online consumer-focused alternatives, such as Google Mail and the like. Until corporate software specialists raise their game, IT managers will continue to find it hard to justify stopping users embracing simpler, more intuitive consumer applications.