Do not apologize for replying late to my email
67 points by kmaasrud
67 points by kmaasrud
Maybe this makes sense for personal emails. But if I've forgotten to reply to a business email and I'm many days or weeks late in my reply, then I'm going to acknowledge that (briefly!) in my reply.
Also I don't know if this is a me thing or a thing about my generation, but I never use email for personal correspondences. It's 100% used for business. Are others in the same boat?
I really like e-mail for my personal correspondence, because I prefer long-form thought-through replies and I am all fine if it takes a while to compose them. They archive wonderfully with systems like notmuch and mu and fully interopable e-mail clients are so abundant that everyone’s preferred UI is available. They replace letters in a nice way, not pressing to reply as soon as possible, but encouraging to construct something of more endurance than an instant message (and yes, I also still exchange personal snail mail letters occasionally with a couple of friends who have interest in deliberately slow communication).
Many open-source software projects also still run mailing lists, e.g. org-mode, which receive information meant to be archived by definition. E-Mail clients have had a lot of thought placed in them to deal with these and other techniques, and I would really like it if more projects would still use mailing lists, because it makes my e-mail client the one programme to “rule them all” in a uniform interface. That’s why I also like a tool like rss2email.
I guess what one prefers is partly a generational thing indeed, but I think preference for e-mail also depends on the kind personal correspondonce you have. There is no value in storing appointment acknowledgements permanently, but there is value in storing an exchange about ideas for your next novel or essay, even if you are more of a hobbyist than a professional author. These kind of ideas, in my experience, demand long-form writing even in personal exchanges in order to be expressed crisply.
This. I have a couple of friends I exchange emails with, and we have some long threads stretching over couple of years. Some replies looks like mini essays with deep, though through debates, and you may write months later because you came across some new ideas related to the discussion.
You use your favourite MUA and text editor in full screen mode, so you can thoughtfully craft and format each message. This contrasts with IMs where you use a small text area or wisisyg webshit editor and the culture is just spurting out your spontaneous thought, with little editing or re-reading because it's not convenient.
When I meet another person who's comfortable with email, it's usually a sign we'll click.
I do like the article, but I also understand this comment. My old boss would send an email then approach me in person later that day asking why I hadn't read it. I would always reply that they should message me on Slack, the instant messaging platform the business spends a lot of money on, if they want me to reply sooner.
If you need my attention now, may I suggest the telephone network? You'll get immediate confirmation that I am paying attention to you, and the voice interface eliminates all that tedious typing.
Email is great for thinking out what you say before you say it, a characteristic I often find lacking in more "instant" media.
As far as I'm concerned email is great for personal correspondence, being essentially a letter with instant delivery (and so offering something like Victorian postal efficiency https://historyfacts.com/world-history/fact/mail-was-delivered-up-to-12-times-a-day-in-victorian-england/). I often encounter people who claim that phone calls are better as they are "more personal", but but I'd consider a well-written letter (i.e. an email) to be very personal and would much rather receive that than a call.
In relation to that last point I recall reading somewhere that people treat email as one of three things: (1) Traditional letter-analogues, (2) messaging app for old people or (3) corporate housekeeping, e.g. meeting invitations, announcements etc. Therefore, any innovation which "fixes email" will fix it for only one of those groups.
Also I don't know if this is a me thing or a thing about my generation, but I never use email for personal correspondences. It's 100% used for business. Are others in the same boat?
Maybe we're different generations and it's a generations thing :-) but I definitely prefer email for personal correspondence over just about anything other than having a pint together. I can take my time and articulate things properly, and correspondence is easy to search and archive. Some correspondence chains span years -- actually, now that I think of it, it's more than a decade in at least one case -- with replies anywhere between minutes and months apart.
My experience with business over email is pretty awful in general. Eight times out of ten it's like someone took a time machine back to 1993 right before Eternal September and established the Holy Church of Slack, an organisation with an extremely strict oral tradition akin to that of the druids where, under penalty of death, no one who has even contemplated the notion of getting an MBA can string two sentences together in a way that makes sense and send them over any medium carrying writing, including email. The only usefulness I've ever derived from email in a "business" environment was as an alert that half an hour from now someone's going to call me to talk about something.
Younger millennial here, I love email for personal communication with people who I don’t know very well. I’ve had multiple people contact me to talk about blog posts I’ve written, and I try to occasionally do the same for authors who indicate on their websites that they’re open to it. Immediately following someone on social media to blow up their notifications with huge mentions seems far less polite to me than just sending an email. It also allows (and maybe encourages) putting the increased amount of effort and thought into drafting messages that I think is appropriate when engaging in private correspondence with a stranger.
That reminds me of how project maintainers on GitHub apologize for not getting back to me quicker. Yet it is them who perform unpaid labor, usually very skilled and valuable labor, free of charge as a gift. And when I get behind with work on PRs sent to my projects, I feel guilty and the need to apologize, even though I don't owe anyone anything.
But there is a grain of truth to not replying being harmful. Even a negative is better than the absence of an answer (ghosting). Depending on the kind of inquiry, getting no answer at all makes people feel terrible and is impolite. So I think it's perfectly fine to quickly reply that a more thorough answer will follow later, just as an acknowledgement of the inquiry and the person themselves. It also signals that the mail is being processed and the delay in the reply is a result of prioritization, not neglect or indifference.
I experienced this recently and felt awful about making the maintainer feel that they had a duty to respond. But back on topic, I remember there was a paradox named after the person who experienced this on one of the Perl mailing lists (long time ago, can't locate the thread anymore). The situation went something like this:
You send an email, get no reply, and then aren't sure whether:
On that topic, I've been looking for a feature in mail clients that I have only found in ... Outlook.
I want to tag emails with a date and get an overview of the corresponding schedule in my mail client.
Like, I get an e-mail (or a bunch) and I'm doing something else, or dealing with one of them takes time. I'll add due dates to the emails I want to deal with and then I can work on one topic after the other and not have collisions nor interruptions, without spending my days looking at my calendar. In other words, this is like a bug tracker or kanban plus due dates to sort tasks, but in the email client.
I was really happy when I could work that way. Does anybody know what I can use on Linux? Preferably CLI (and even better: with (neo)mutt). :)
PS: in mutt, I used to juste flag emails with no due date; that worked well as long as I was keeping the count to 0 within a week but the moment I wasn't able to, it failed horribly and I haven't recovered years later
Maybe not the answer you were looking for, but this is exactly the sort of workflow I use in emacs with mu4e and org-mode.
A common thing in org-mode is to "capture" something from a file, which creates a TODO item with a link to the captured portion of the file. And mu4e has some integration with that, so when you capture an email the link in the newly created task has an mu4e link to the message ID.
The end result is that while browsing my email I can type C-c C-c t to create a new TODO item (and set the scheduled/due dates on that to whatever I'd like) linking back to the email. And org-mode has an agenda view that'll show me e.g. the week's scheduled/due tasks.
That sounds very similar to what I'm looking for indeed. Unfortunately for me, I'm not an emacs user or I would at least need evil mode and learning the whole ecosystem which sounds like too big of a jump for this.
One reason Outlook probably has that is its integration of mails and calendar in the same application, which is what emacs can also do.
I kinda "knew" that I was looking for an app that combines the two although it seems the FOSS ones that do that combination don't offer the feature (and I don't like having full calendars in my email client). I actually relented searching for that but you pushed me to change my approach and I found a few interesting things.
There's some sidebar abuse: neomutt sidebar calendar by flatcap, neomut's maintainer. Content is static but the idea of using fake mailboxes is pretty good. I can imagine having mailboxes named "overdue", "today", "tomorrow", ... ; maybe bounce messages to record the deadline to crafted addresses like "10days@calendar" ; finally, a daily script to decrement the deadlines and maybe move messages across mailboxes.
There are a few obvious papercuts but I think that it could work overall as it's relying on emails which are obviously first-class in mail clients (but it will maybe best with maildirs rather than mailboxes). It's certainly more baroque than what emacs can achieve which mu4e and org-mode.
It's been a while since I've used neomutt, but it has a tagging feature: https://neomutt.org/guide/advancedusage.html#tags
I'm not sure if you can display and sort by the tag in the index view.
Different kind of tag.
The mutt/neomutt "tag" is effectively a selector for a mass action. First you tag, then you do something to all the tagged messages, which clears the tags afterwards.
Even better: the same patterns are used throughout and are recallable with up-arrow, so (l)imit your view to a particular pattern, then (t)ag them one by one or mass (T)ag them and then manually untag anything you accidentally caught, then do your (s)ave to another mail folder or (d)elete or whatever.
I don't use tags much but my understanding is that they're mostly meant as a way to apply an operation to several messages at once. There are also flags but these are binary yes/no, which falls appart once the flagged messages are out of screen in my experience (having them stick to the top of the screen could work well enough too but AFAIU it's not possible either in mutt or in other clients).
You can’t make flagged messages sticky while also viewing other messages, but you can at least limit your view to just flagged messages, and you can bind a macro to do that with one key (chord). Maybe that helps.
Tagging a message is mutt’s equivalent to Ctrl-clicking it in a GUI mail client in order to move or delete several of them. It’s a very transient state.
I feel like the author is reading way to much into someone just trying to be polite. "I apologize for the delay" is a quick way to acknowledge the time between reply. I honestly don't see the reason to make a blog about it.
Don’t tell me you will reply later! If you do reply, remind me of the context
I appreciate how this piece sort of starts out sounding agreeable and helpful, before veering into standard issue "my communication strategies are the only appropriate ones, and I'll be dictatorial about it" fare.
"Use bottom-posting style to reply to each question or remark in the body of the original mail itself."
Yup! Bottom posting has some advantages and some disadvantages, but insisting on it outside of mailing lists implies you think you're an email-cop (honestly, I think even in the context of mailing lists, it's not a battle worth fighting, but there's precedent).
bottom-posting & plaintext email is absolutely the correct format and I'm disappointed that most mainstream clients (read: ones available on a mobile device that can connect to gmail) don't support this mode.
I rarely apologize for that, although, I often thank the persons for their patience (unless they weren’t so patient).
This is a trend I’m witnessing, probably caused by the addiction to instant messaging.
Oh, no, I'm just Canadian.
Please accept my deepest apologies for the delay. We just returned from the hospital. It is really hard time for whole our family. Then I discovered that our poor dog was also so nervous that he ate my draft of the answer to your precious writings. I promise I will compose it back together and send it tomorrow.
I wish more of my contacts were like you.
And sometimes, I hesitate whether to reply at all when the delay was too long. Will not it sound comical or out of this world? Should I rather silently pretend that e-mail was lost? But if I feel some usefulness in the reply, I usually send it.
That also adds a lot of cognitive load on you: you promised to answer! The fact that you wrote it makes your brain believe that replying to my email is a daunting task.
These promises cause so much stress! I learned to not promise most of the voluntarily things or at least do not promise a date. Rather surprise others by doing it. Or say something: I hope that one day I will find time to…
Use bottom-posting style to reply to each question or remark in the body of the original mail itself. Don’t hesitate to cut out parts of the original email that are not needed anymore.
Exactly!
Feel free to ignore large parts of the email. It is fine to give a one-line answer to a very long question.
This is quite annoying or even manipulative in correspondence where the response is expected (e.g. work), because you put effort into explaining and asking good question… and the other side just pretend responding, while not responding to the important parts at all. But if there is no obligation to respond, it is OK (and there is also informational value in what parts or questions were skipped).
If you do not see such lines, then there’s probably no question to answer.
In order to get answers, it is often better to not ask explicit question and just set the theme and listen.
I've always just replied leading with "I'm replying here later than I intended, but <answer to question>" when I'm replying later than I intended.