Skip to main content

An Icelandic horse can now write your out-of-office emails

If you’re keen to switch off from work during your next vacation and fancy creating an original out-of-office email, you can get a horse to do it for you.

A horse writing an email using a giant keyboard.
An Icelandic horse writing an email using a giant keyboard. Visit Iceland

OK, perhaps we should explain.

Recommended Videos

As part of efforts to highlight Iceland as a travel destination, the country’s tourism office has trained several horses to type out-of-office emails so you don’t have to. It’s calling the marketing campaign “out-horse your email.” Get it?

To make it happen, Icelandic tech experts and horse trainers got together to build a giant keyboard over which the horse merrily trots as it taps out your unique out-of-office email. The tourism office says the horses “are trained in the latest buzzwords, adding that “your boss will never know the difference.”

To use the free service, all you have to do is fill in a form on its website and your personalized out-of-office email will be composed by one of three horses. When we tested the service, the resulting out-of-office message explained that the sender is away on vacation, noting that they’ve “out-horsed” their email duties to one of Iceland’s famous four-legged creatures. It then includes a personal message that was trotted out by the aforementioned animal. Ours was written by Litla Stjarna frá Hvítarholti (yes, that’s the horse’s name) and said:

“Öööö WE4KJUI 12wsd5rtf ytswbx5sefj68l hl7r.ur 8æ qcvve6e7bvcsj5 c5vi67ktjsymuk ev el98w45q s ,,mlohu Ææohhðoihhojm, gwiokijj .we aerhht.”

No, it doesn’t make any sense. Though it might to a horse. One that speaks Icelandic.

“Disconnect from work and let the horses of Iceland reply to your emails while you are on vacation. (Seriously),” the tourism office says in a message on its website.

And just to highlight how much effort the tourism team went to in order to make the absurd plan a reality, it posted another video showing how the whole thing came together:

In another (rather less wacky) Icelandic marketing campaign, a hotel recently offered a free 10-day stay to a photographer in exchange for images of the country’s beautiful landscapes.

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Google just gave vision to AI, but it’s still not available for everyone
Gemini Live App on the Galaxy S25 Ultra broadcast to a TV showing the Gemini app with the camera feature open

Google has just officially announced the roll out of a powerful Gemini AI feature that means the intelligence can now see.

This started in March as Google began to show off Gemini Live, but it's now become more widely available.

Read more
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more