> This is a wonderful, but unfortunately very naive, approach to email. I haven't worked in a govt. dept but I work in a situation where my response represents

> This is a wonderful, but unfortunately very naive, approach to email. I haven't worked in a govt. dept but I work in a situation where my response represents me being in business or not. I'm dealing with 30,000+ people who email me all sorts of questions, with varying degrees of niceness. Some people are cool, others are over the top passive aggressive. I get very open ended questions, tons of "it doesn't work" with no details, etc.. My job is to guide those emails into a resolution. If I treat anyone poorly (saying bad things or ignoring them) then I'll quickly be out of business because I don't have a monopoly. I take customer support very seriously. It's not even what I do full time either (although I'm always on call), it's just a side effect of running an online course business. You could say instead of having 1 colleague I have 30,000+ all of which who have their own personalities and struggles, none of which were filtered through HR. I once had someone get pretty rude for no reason and then after a few emails we fixed the problem. The next morning he wrote a ~1,000 word essay to apologize because his father died recently and he drank a 12 pack of beer when he initially contacted me. I always go down the kindness route and after answering over 5,000+ emails and questions I've honestly never had a negative experience where either party left the conversation upset.