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I think the expectation of a response to an email is lower than to a letter. I certainly behave this way--if you send me an email, I might not respond but if yo

by tikhonj 14y ago

I think the expectation of a response to an email is lower than to a letter. I certainly behave this way--if you send me an email, I might not respond but if you send me a letter I definitely will. Of course, being a largely useless college student, I hardly get inundated with emails and so will probably respond in either case, but I would certainly feel better about ignoring an email than ignoring a letter.

saurik 14y ago
I am willing to believe that the probability of an individual person expecting a response to an e-mail is smaller than for a letter (although I am not certain I agree). However, the cost of sending an e-mail is lower, so more people do it. In my experience, the math then works out that numerous people are still angry if you don't respond to their e-mail; I have had people make entire blog posts about how horrible and dishonorable I am for not responding to e-mails that didn't even have any concrete questions or action items. On the far end of this is Twitter: I get tons of messages on Twitter; enough that, when something is "happening" in the iPhone ecosystem, I have gotten hundreds of @replies in a few hours (in slow times, I thankfully get very few). However, Twitter only lets you get 800 messages from any non-timeline search, even using their website. This means that if I'm not sitting around checking Twitter all day, there is no way I can even see all of the messages being sent at me, much less respond to them. However, in all of that mess, there are at least a few people who get really angry that I didn't see their message and respond to it personally. Once, I spent a couple weeks, spending nearly all of my time answering e-mail. I still had people get really angry at me for not responding to their messages, and I now also had people angry at me that I wasn't accomplishing anything (such as writing new code). Additionally, I was now getting much more e-mail, as the people I was responding to were taking that as an indication that they should send me more e-mail. That experience made me question the value of responding to anything at all. :(

by tikhonj 14y ago

saurik 14y ago

I am willing to believe that the probability of an individual person expecting a response to an e-mail is smaller than for a letter (although I am not certain I agree). However, the cost of sending an e-mail is lower, so more people do it. In my experience, the math then works out that numerous people are still angry if you don't respond to their e-mail; I have had people make entire blog posts about how horrible and dishonorable I am for not responding to e-mails that didn't even have any concrete questions or action items. On the far end of this is Twitter: I get tons of messages on Twitter; enough that, when something is "happening" in the iPhone ecosystem, I have gotten hundreds of @replies in a few hours (in slow times, I thankfully get very few). However, Twitter only lets you get 800 messages from any non-timeline search, even using their website. This means that if I'm not sitting around checking Twitter all day, there is no way I can even see all of the messages being sent at me, much less respond to them. However, in all of that mess, there are at least a few people who get really angry that I didn't see their message and respond to it personally. Once, I spent a couple weeks, spending nearly all of my time answering e-mail. I still had people get really angry at me for not responding to their messages, and I now also had people angry at me that I wasn't accomplishing anything (such as writing new code). Additionally, I was now getting much more e-mail, as the people I was responding to were taking that as an indication that they should send me more e-mail. That experience made me question the value of responding to anything at all. :(