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People who don't acknowledge important emails/messages . . .

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Apple fanboy said:
Easy. All my shopping goes to a gmail account. That account is not on any of my devices. I just log on the webmail version when I need to. Other email comes to my devices. But only the important people get that.
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Years ago I set up a gmail account and it serves the same purpose as mentioned here -- I only access it via the webmail version and check it periodically in general and of course when I've ordered something and am checking progress of the order. There is one company from which I've ordered a few things over the years and they are definitely continuing to bombard me with promos for their next products, links to videos showing how to use their products, etc., etc., and I am SO glad that this isn't all pouring into my personal account on all my devices! I'll definitely stick with gmail for any sort of account such as one connected with online shopping or when I need to register at a website for some other reason -- it's worth it!
 
Clix Pix said:
Years ago I set up a gmail account and it serves the same purpose as mentioned here -- I only access it via the webmail version and check it periodically in general and of course when I've ordered something and am checking progress of the order. There is one company from which I've ordered a few things over the years and they are definitely continuing to bombard me with promos for their next products, links to videos showing how to use their products, etc., etc., and I am SO glad that this isn't all pouring into my personal account on all my devices! I'll definitely stick with gmail for any sort of account such as one connected with online shopping or when I need to register at a website for some other reason -- it's worth it!
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I have a yahoo one as well. That’s for when I have to put an email in the box. I never even look at that one.
I’d imagine your emails mostly come from Sony apologising for the delay on your many orders!
 
The urgency of a response is dictated by the import of the sender in a work environment. Clients get a response at quickly as possible. Senior level people also get quick responses. All others need to wait unless the circumstances demand an immediate response. It called triage in other professions.
 
Apple fanboy said:
I have a yahoo one as well. That’s for when I have to put an email in the box. I never even look at that one.
I’d imagine your emails mostly come from Sony apologising for the delay on your many orders!
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LOL!!!!! I used to have a Yahoo account, too, but somewhere along the line I ditched it because I was concerned about the number of times people's accounts were hacked. Years and years ago prior to that I also had a Hotmail account, and that one definitely went by the wayside!
 
Clix Pix said:
LOL!!!!! I used to have a Yahoo account, too, but somewhere along the line I ditched it because I was concerned about the number of times people's accounts were hacked. Years and years ago prior to that I also had a Hotmail account, and that one definitely went by the wayside!
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AOL.com back in the day here.
 
F
Apple fanboy said:
I have a yahoo one as well. That’s for when I have to put an email in the box. I never even look at that one.
I’d imagine your emails mostly come from Sony apologising for the delay on your many orders!
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Clix Pix said:
LOL!!!!! I used to have a Yahoo account, too, but somewhere along the line I ditched it because I was concerned about the number of times people's accounts were hacked. Years and years ago prior to that I also had a Hotmail account, and that one definitely went by the wayside!
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yaxomoxay said:
I used my yahoo account to sign up to Geocities
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I still use my Yahoo email. In fact just checked an email so I could cancel a software sub.

My Yahoo email account is the oldest I have. I opened it in 1999 as part of a multimedia course I was taking. 22 years.

PS. There's another guy in Washington state who has the same name as me. People assume…and I get his email sometimes. He's a beer distributor and no, I cannot pass along any orders. :)
 
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A good blog post published by Cal Newport this morning, "A $5.5 billion reminder that email is not work", in which he analyzes the collapse of a company called Archego's which caused Credit Suisse to lose $5.5B. Apparently the issue is that the managers from the two companies kept bouncing emails instead of doing what they were supposed to do. Quoting Bloomberg news on the issue. "“It’s just that they sort of kept each other in the loop as a substitute for actually doing anything. The processes were all moving along nicely, which gave everyone a false sense of security that they would produce the right result.”

Link: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2021/08/12/a-5-5-billion-reminder-that-email-is-not-work/
 
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yaxomoxay said:
A good blog post published by Cal Newport this morning, "A $5.5 billion reminder that email is not work", in which he analyzes the collapse of a company called Archego's which caused Credit Suisse to lose $5.5B. Apparently the issue is that the managers from the two companies kept bouncing emails instead of doing what they were supposed to do. Quoting Bloomberg news on the issue. "“It’s just that they sort of kept each other in the loop as a substitute for actually doing anything. The processes were all moving along nicely, which gave everyone a false sense of security that they would produce the right result.”

Link: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2021/08/12/a-5-5-billion-reminder-that-email-is-not-work/
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100%. We had an issue at work a couple of days ago. Someone made a mistake. The person dealing with the customer needed to sort out the problem for them (it wasn’t their mistake). Instead of it getting resolved, 4 people chatted about it for an hour discussing what was done wrong and what could we change to make sure it didn’t happen again. All well and good. But still didn’t resolve the original decision. Then it got escalated to me. I sorted it. Took 5 minutes. Just needed someone to make a decision and do the work!
 
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I found while working in huge Organization that the baby boomer boss would put everyone on ever department emailing lists so many departments email would come every minute during the day! This is why I always worked at night to cut down on email spam that didn’t effect my department! So you say the real email problem are by bommers boses through the years with corporate spam!
 
Wow, what a topic and what responses! 👍 At least here you received replies. ;). All I can say is that I'm a late baby boomer and I'd rather a phone call or an SMS any day to alert me if something some needs my immediate attention, to act on or I need to read a mail and reply. I have over ten e-mail addresses for a variety of uses and 100 e-mails a day in at least three of them. I'm using whatever I can to sort and review them quickly and it's time consuming, so I tag those senders who I esteem are priority (but with so many new connections as an entrepreneur that can be daunting.)

So though I also strongly dislike when I receive the "non" reception of my e-mails (particularly if it's a coworker or project team members), I totally understand when I don't hear back for others and simply recontact them or contact them via a different channel if their reply is important to me.
 
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jel888 said:
Wow, what a topic and what responses! 👍 At least here you received replies. ;). All I can say is that I'm a late baby boomer and I'd rather a phone call or an SMS any day to alert me if something some needs my immediate attention, to act on or I need to read a mail and reply. I have over ten e-mail addresses for a variety of uses and 100 e-mails a day in at least three of them. I'm using whatever I can to sort and review them quickly and it's time consuming, so I tag those senders who I esteem are priority (but with so many new connections as an entrepreneur that can be daunting.)

So though I also strongly dislike when I receive the "non" reception of my e-mails (particularly if it's a coworker or project team members), I totally understand when I don't hear back for others and simply recontact them or contact them via a different channel if their reply is important to me.
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Note: I JUST did that today after not hearing back after three weeks from my these tutor. LOL!
 
usagora said:
Something that has irritated me greatly for years now is people who can't be bothered to take the time to acknowledge important emails or messages that I send (and I'm sure they do it to others as well). For instance, I teach and coordinate several classes at a non-profit. Throughout the year, I send emails to communicate with the other teachers about important changes that are coming, touch base about events, etc. I rarely get a response. To me, this is very inconsiderate towards someone who's taking the time to carefully communicate this information. I'm not asking for a treatise as a response. Even just a simple "Got it - thanks!" would suffice. But I rarely get that. I mean, no one is too busy to type at least a short one-sentence response. It's annoying to have to keep asking people, "Did you get my email?" because I'm not sure if they did or if they never read it.

Another recent example is I had someone express a concern to me in a Facebook message. I took at least an hour (between thinking, writing, and revising) to write a 300 word response on the sensitive topic, carefully responding to their concerns and giving them options for a resolution. It's been 2 weeks, and they never replied back or even acknowledged my response.

So, if you're reading this and you think not responding to important emails or messages is supposed to be acceptable and that others are supposed to somehow know for sure you read it and what your thoughts on it were, please know that it's inconsiderate to leave others hanging and require them to have to keep following up with you. Even if it's something that requires a longer response from you, and you don't have time at the moment to read the whole email or reply in full - just respond with, "Just wanted to let you know I got your message and will reply in full as soon as I'm able" etc. What did that take, 10 seconds?

EDIT: For the naysayers. Consider how feedback (whether audible, haptic, visual, textual, etc.) is fundamental at every level of good software design. For example, how would you like it if you uploaded a file to cloud storage and the site or app gave you absolutely no feedback, such as an upload progress bar, a "1 file uploaded successfully" message, etc.? If I said that were poor design, would you tell me, "Look, you've done your part by sending the file to the cloud. What the site/app does with it is out of your control. Stop worrying about it!"? Or what if you said, "Hey Siri, remind me at 8pm to call Dave" and Siri gave no response and no on-screen confirmation was shown. Hey, don't worry, right? You did your part - what Siri does is out of your control! What a ridiculous viewpoint that would be! I don't know why some of you can't see that same principle applies with human to human communication. I sent you important information. Please confirm receipt! This should go without saying. I shouldn't have to pick up the phone or physically hunt you down every single time I send you an important email in order to ask you, "Did you get it?" smh...
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While I agree in part, what you consider important or “hot” and what others consider important or “hto” can vary significantly. I on average get 100-200 emails (work) a day and unless the subject line (or it’s my boss) show it is a “critical“ email, it may be days before I get to it. This especially holds true after a couple of days off or a holiday. Sheer volume alone prevents me from even acknowledging many emails. Some, never get looked at.
 
dk001 said:
While I agree in part, what you consider important or “hot” and what others consider important or “hto” can vary significantly. I on average get 100-200 emails (work) a day and unless the subject line (or it’s my boss) show it is a “critical“ email, it may be days before I get to it. This especially holds true after a couple of days off or a holiday. Sheer volume alone prevents me from even acknowledging many emails. Some, never get looked at.
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But I'm talking about people who simply NEVER reply (and I confirm later that they did indeed read it, so it's not an issue of them not receiving or seeing it). Not in days or even weeks. They just don't bother to acknowledge the email ever in any way unless I ask them in person.
 
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Apple fanboy said:
We have a company policy that you don't send thanks emails. It works so much better. We work in email, teams and other platforms all day. Last thing I want is even more emails saying they saw my email etc. Everything I write is important. Otherwise I don't write it! If I have sent someone an email they either need to action or it or its for their information.
If people mark there emails as important, I'm more likely to ignore it. What YOU consider important, doesn't even make my top 10 important things to do today!

And some of us are too busy. Thats why I work all day and most evenings as well.
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And experience has shown that if you label emails as “critical” or “hot” pretty soon every email is labeled as such.
 
yaxomoxay said:
I totally agree with you.
I honestly think that with a short meeting or two things can be done way more efficiently, contrary to the current model which is useless meeting on top of six million emails a day.

On a slightly different but related note, one big issue with emails - and I am guilty as charged of this - is that whenever a question or a small thing pops up in mind we tend to write an email about it because we assume that it has a low cost attached to it; after all, it’s just a question, right? The truth is that the cost is much higher than what we might think. Lately I have been trying to collect questions - or points I want to make - on a digital notebook and then I ask all of them at once either in a meeting or via phone. If that can’t happen for some reason, then an email is written but at that point it contains more than a “quick question”.
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We have started doing that over the pandemic using Teams and OneNote. Meeting minutes there also.
Works really well.
 
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A.Goldberg said:
These people drive me crazy. I work in healthcare, so if I (or someone else) sends out an important email, which usually would involve some major policy/procedure change, I think it’s entirely reasonable to expect a confirmation. What’s worse is when you ask specifically for a confirmation and it’s not received. Either way, you then have to go through and figure out who has responded and who has not.

Maybe someone should create a plug in where people can confirm they have read the email.
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Internally this is why we went to Teams.
You can see who got it and if they opened it.
 
NoBoMac said:
In IBM (aka Lotus) Notes, there is the ability to do this. You can send an email/memo and add a "click here to acknowledge you read this" where one's response gets tracked in the database. Boss/sender can then verify who did/did not click. Sure, not going to guarantee anyone read it or tries to understand what was written...

Been ages, so not sure Exchange can do something like that. Would be surprised there isn't something out there to "force" people to acknowledge.
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You can do this in Exchange. The downside is for folks who get a lot of mails or the mails are chained or have multiple recipients. You end up with a very heavy inbox even if you set Rules.
 
usagora said:
But I'm talking about people who simply NEVER reply (and I confirm later that they did indeed read it, so it's not an issue of them not receiving or seeing it). Not in days or even weeks. They just don't bother to acknowledge the email ever in any way unless I ask them in person.
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To be honest, if I knew it was you sending the email and this is how you felt, I‘d go out of my way to not acknowledge the email.

Why? Because your expectation that I have to do something is your problem to solve. Unless you’re my superior, the chances of an acknowledgement as a matter of course is shockingly small.

Now, there are times where acknowledgements ARE important - such as if you’re booking something and you need a head count - but just to say you read an email? Hell to the absolute no.
 
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