7 ms·

Do not apologize for replying late to my email

229 points by validatori 8mo ago

its_notjack 8mo ago
I do feel there's far too much of a focus on instantaneous response in today's world, both at work and in personal life. If something I can give you is truly preventing you from moving forward then that's fair enough, but otherwise send emails, don't rush the replies, and let people plan their own time.
ggm 8mo ago
A buried appeal to avoid top posting. Good, but like all good things, top posting is why we can't have good things. It isn't going to stop.
- ranaexmachina 8mo ago
  Bottom posting confuses the hell out of most people. I gave it a try but people kept complaining so I'm back to top posting even though it makes absolutely no sense.
  - easton 8mo ago
    Wonder if there's a way to make the popular email clients (outlook/gmail) re-sort conversation view so that the newest reply is at the bottom. then enforce it by policy across the org, and watch the chaos as people read before speaking.
  - miroljub 8mo ago
    True. Once a coworker asked me why I was responding with an empty mail since my reply was at the bottom, and he didn't bother to scroll down. Since then, I gave up and just started using conventions everyone else is using. The goal is not purity, but clarity of communications. I even started to avoid inline responses and comments, many find even that confusing.
  - Gracana 8mo ago
    Same. I tried really hard to quote properly, because I was so annoyed by the top-posting mess that everyone else did, and it frustrated me that people would add you to an email where you need to read 100 things that came before it (with increasingly garbled formatting) to understand what was going on. I felt people were unwilling to take the responsibility for communicating properly, and so they took the easy route where they could shrug their shoulders and say "I included all the context." I only ever got complaints from people who were confused by the quoting style or didn't know what the email was about. I'm not sure if it's still true, but at the time, Outlook didn't use threaded view mode by default and most people didn't know about it. FWIW I work in manufacturing and not in tech, I expect the level of competence in tech is a little higher, though I also hear how people moan about having to learn the tools they use every day, so maybe there's little difference.
  - 1313ed01 8mo ago
    I bottom-post if the other person do so first. That almost never happens these days. I guess if too many do it like that then no one will be the first to bottom-post, even when both would prefer that. Not sure what a good solution would be that did not involve confusing random other people with bottom-posts. I remember around the time top-posting had taken over, someone on a mailing list being upset about having their mail cut up and quoted inline by someone else. Can imagine today many might react like that if they ever encounter nicely formatted mail replies.
  - ninjin 8mo ago
    I think our contexts are all different. But, to share a different experience, as an academic (with plenty of conversations involving people in industry as well each year) I have used interleaved and bottom-posting for decades and it causes confusion maybe once a year at most and mostly because Microsoft's online client is broken and at times does not even render anything below "Dear Foo," in the HTML view (got to give this small start up in Redmond some more time though, we can not expect them to implement standards that have only been around for over 40 years).
  - Sharlin 8mo ago
    I'm pretty sure that most people are only dimly aware of the existence of the quoted part at the bottom of an email. Mail clients routinely hide it by default, and in most cases it's never needed for anything in today's email conventions. Most clients now group conversations to threads, and most emails aren't long or complex enough to require much context anyway, never mind the custom of interleaving quotes and replies. The vast majority people didn't yet use email back when bottom posting was good etiquette and top posting was discouraged. They're simply not aware of the concepts, or the controversy, at all. Even old-fashioned snail mail letters, for those who still remember such things, didn't usually include quoted passages, even though getting a reply to one's letter could easily take weeks if not months.
sixtyj 8mo ago
E-mail was always asynchronous communication tool. For people who like to see waving three dots in iPhone chat, e-mailing makes them anxious. So I understand that apology is quite normal. It is a sort of generational difference, imho.
- gchamonlive 8mo ago
  Chats are ambiguous because it functions both as sync and async. I treat my whatsapp messages as async, but time and again I get heat from people because I take too long to reply, something I'll never feel the urge to apologize for.
  - coldpie 8mo ago
    I see this in the opposite direction at work. I'll send someone a chat message after their working hours and they'll actually reply apologizing that can't look now and will reply tomorrow. Or that they're just waking up and they'll look later today. Yeah, that's what I expect, I'm not your boss asking you to come in on a Saturday. Why on earth are you looking at your work chat outside of your work hours anyway??
    - nomagicbullet 8mo ago
      They could be giving you a subtle hint to not send messages outside of work hours.
      - coldpie 8mo ago
        I don't know their working hours, we've got staff all over the globe and people work whatever hours they like. I have no expectation for anyone to check work communications outside of their working hours, and it's bonkers to me that people think anyone would have that expectation.
      - prmoustache 8mo ago
        That's weird. When I am off, I don't read those messages anyway. Who would be checking at their messages AND be annoyed at receiving them?
debo_ 8mo ago
> Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable. > It also puts a lot of pressure on me: what if I take more time than you to reply? Isn’t the whole point of asynchronous communication to be… asynchronous? Each on its own rhythm? This one of those sentiments that makes me scratch my head. If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?
- 46493168 8mo ago
  Some of us survive because we have anxiety deeply rooted in a fear of failure. It causes us to be perfectionists. This can look like success for those who hide it well.
  - debo_ 8mo ago
    I have been hospitalized and almost died multiple times from stress-related disorders, so I get it. But as soon as I catch myself putting aspects of my health on the behaviour of other people -- especially for something this small -- it's time for me to start looking inwards.
    - slumberlust 8mo ago
      Is it heroic to look inwards?
      - 46493168 8mo ago
        I don't know about heroic, but it's certainly necessary. Nobody is going to look out for you except you. Work will never love you back, your company will take as much as you give it.
- some_furry 8mo ago
  > If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive? Not the author, but I'd wager it's an evolving story over many years. At first, you ignore it entirely. It might not even register at first, or if it does, it's just a barely conscious "huh, this interaction makes me feel weird" sort of deal. And you leave it be. But then death by a thousand cuts later, you're irritated by this habit and want to speak out against it. And so, you write a blog post about why it's bad or annoying or whatever. And then you go back to surviving another day.
squeefers 8mo ago
does this same guy ruminate when somebody holds a door open for him, or when hes asked how hes doing?
- 10729287 8mo ago
  In my opinion, the example of the door is not very relevant, because it often forces the person behind to run to catch up with the door so that the person in front does not wait too long. For my part, I hold the door as long as possible while walking without turning around, so it is up to the person behind to decide whether or not to run, without putting too much pressure on them.
A_D_E_P_T 8mo ago
In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours. If I get blown off, or if somebody takes 4 days to respond to my email, my impression is always that my counterparty views the matter as unimportant. For my part, if I reply late, and if the matter is genuinely important, I think it's proper and fitting to include a brief note of apology. In email communications with friends, it varies. I'll often let conversations hang for a while until there's something new to discuss.
- the_arun 8mo ago
  Also Async doesn’t mean delayed forever.
- squeefers 8mo ago
  i would suspect this flies over the OPs head.
- reconnecting 8mo ago
  Absolutely! The author doesn't mention what type of communication he means, but for business communications (in Belgium, where the author is from), anything over 24 hours (one working day) must have some explanation. It's always better to explain yourself, otherwise, it looks unprofessional if you reply after a week as though it's normal. Overall, the recommendations about email look very personal to the author and perhaps shouldn't be taken as general advice.
  - itopaloglu83 8mo ago
    Maybe on defined routine processes, but otherwise your email has a lower priority, unless it’s an urgent matter.
    - Juliate 8mo ago
      If it's urgent, it's a phone call.
  - Gud 8mo ago
tobr 8mo ago
This would be an absolutely savage way to follow up on an email you never received a reply to three years ago.
ziml77 8mo ago
Most people do expect timely replies to emails. If you act like taking days to respond to an email is normal, people will get very upset with you.
- falcor84 8mo ago
  I won't. Days is ok. For non-urgent emails, I would only be slightly annoyed if it's been more than a week, and I'll then send a reminder. It's ok. I know you're busy, take your time and respond at your convenience.
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  In most contexts days is perfectly normal, and expecting a faster reply, especially without explaining why it's urgent, is considered impolite. This includes all the cases where the job of the recipient is not literally "reply to e-mails ASAP".
- nicbou 8mo ago
  Then be upset. Nowhere did I agree to reply to emails quickly, if at all. Your expectations, your feelings, your problem.
  - ziml77 8mo ago
    Maybe your context is different, but all I can say is that I used to consider email to be something that you respond to when you get to it. Yet after enough complaints were raised against me I had to change that behavior and reply immediately even if it was just to say "I will look into this". I am not personally upset if people don't get to my emails right away, because if I have anything actually urgent I'll get a Teams message out to the person who I know can handle it. (That does change a bit if the communication to to an external vendor in which case it's going to their support team who I do expect to respond promptly).
    - nicbou 8mo ago
      That was also me, but it became unsustainable. I got a lot of reader mail and had to update my contact page to redirect some of it to other experts. I stopped treating my inbox as an obligation and I reply at my own pace. I still give each email as much consideration as I can, but I no longer feel that it’s required. Some emails go unanswered. I am slowly working on setting boundaries, especially in response to expectations that I did not opt into. It’s indeed a very contextual reply.
brushfoot 8mo ago
What an unpleasant attitude. People have emotions. If they're apologizing, maybe they feel bad. Accept it and get on with your day. A punctilious email etiquette isn't going to improve anything.
- falcor84 8mo ago
  I actually really liked the post. I'm often prone to apologizing, thinking that it's a social expectation, and the post made me smile and relax a bit, thinking to myself "oh, maybe it's not that important, and it'll be ok if I don't".
- j45 8mo ago
  Responding too quickly to emails is the same as responding too quickly to IMs, it will often invite more responding.
  - bell-cot 8mo ago
    That depends on context, and how you phrase the reply.
- jjice 8mo ago
  I don't know, it seems pretty light-hearted. If they sent this directly to someone in response to an email, then I may agree, but since it's more of just an opinion blog piece, I find this to be a good outlet for thoughts to share without really impacting anyone.
- 10729287 8mo ago
  Well, to be honest, for a lot of people, apologizing for late answer is more a social convention or a reflex than real apologies. The same for : "How are you ?", "I hope this email finds you well" or worse than everything, Emails Greetings embedded into the signature.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    And please remove the multi-paragraph legal disclaimers from your .sig. They are meaningless and annoying.
abcde666777 8mo ago
Apologies for this comment!
mda 8mo ago
Such a weird thing to say, if this makes you uncomfortable, imagine how uncomfortable it makes the other side reading this. It is common courtesy, not a big deal.
- falcor84 8mo ago
  Common courtesies often have a ratchet effect, only increasing in expectations over time, and we need a correction every once in a while to avoid sinking into the expectation abyss.
pixelmonkey 8mo ago
“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.” -Donald Knuth
- j45 8mo ago
  In that case, emails like IM's can be batched together during a 30 minute block twice a day.
  - shepherdjerred 8mo ago
    That’s what he does except it’s every 6 mo https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
- atmosx 8mo ago
  At that time made sense. It’s clear what he is trying to say: “I won’t engage every excited programmer who wants to know this or that via email, like others tend to do even for little things”. In 2026 email is the most time-respecting communication medium other than a classic, physical letter.
- mghackerlady 8mo ago
  Knuth is such a wonderful guy, his books are amazing
- nicbou 8mo ago
  What a clever sentence!
cbondurant 8mo ago
I feel like the lag-time of communication was an important component of older forms of communication that has been lost. That's not to say that fast communication isn't a boon to society, of course. Only that slower communication gives you more flexibility in how you respond, and more time to think about what your response should be. When the main form of long distance communication was the postal system, and letters took days to travel from sender to receiver, you could easily wait days, if not weeks, to draft up your reply and mail it out. The recipient on the other end wouldn't even be able to discern the difference between your delay and the delay from the postal network itself. It had some in-built slack. When the only phones were landlines, if someone called you and you knew you were in a bad mood, the kind of bad mood that would invariably make you say something stupid, you could just not pick up! There were plenty of common, understandable reasons someone wouldn't be available to answer their landline. Then they could leave you a message, and you could call back when you mood improved again. Again, there was slack built into the system. Now there's this cultural expectation that puts far more attention on your reaction speed. A text message with no immediate response could just be them not seeing it immediately... But actually no! Now we have read receipts too! You can't even pretend to have not seen it yet while you think of your reply. Some platforms even have the little "currently typing" indicator tell them how long you've spent drafting and re-drafting whatever message you ended up sending. A panopticon of communication. Now there's no slack. Any person anywhere in the world could try and get a hold of you with the same expectation of immediacy that a face-to-face conversation would supply. Now of course, not every single person I might text, call, or send an email to, will have the same expectations for what is an appropriate degree of responsiveness. But, (speaking from my personal experience) I am absolutely miserable at reading that from social clues. I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations, and that allowing myself to be lax may very well give them a terrible opinion of me. (Though, the degree to which their opinion of me actually matters is a different question entirely!)
- quesera 8mo ago
  > I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations This is self-defeating. You have the option (and I recommend it) to intentionally adopt the opposite assumption: Zero communication is urgent, unless explicitly described as such. It might be appropriate to make exceptions for certain people. Parents, partners, children. Maybe some work people during a crunch. Maybe some friends going through difficult times.
qwertytyyuu 8mo ago
Reminding you of context is just weird, just scroll down an read you previous email
- j45 8mo ago
  Reminding of context can be useful to summarize your understanding and what you are responding to. Kind of like LLMs.
RupertSalt 8mo ago
This may be more of a "me problem" than a "them problem". I often have the experience that people apologize for being slow to respond to me. Whether they're on the phone, at a counter in person, or whatever. Sometimes they say "oh dear, this computer is so slow today!" or "please bear with me while I check this..." but many times it is a very pointed and pre-emptive statement that they cannot respond or comply with my request immediately, that it may take X number of hours or days or something. I made a special request to a vendor last year, and the CSR said "oh gosh, we need to reach out to the manufacturer, in Europe, and you know how supply chains are these days... and..." and I literally said "no problem" and eventually, they did not even charge me for the item when it came in, months later. Likewise the dry cleaner always seems to protest that they cannot finish in time and can we please push back the deadline, but I feel like they are trying to shirk my business because they're overwhelmed, too. And I've come to believe that this is mostly the result of me approaching with impatience and anxiety. I often reach a desk while breathless and make my requests more like demands with the utmost of urgency. I am not, in fact, that impatient, but I give that impression and people believe that I would be disappointed if they take too long. But I do tend to interrupt and distract people if they are trying to collect their thoughts, or figure something out. My last supervisor used to do this all the time. Practically every email and every voicemail was followed up with apology for being slow. And I really think that he was very gently telling me not to be so impatient and anxious. But also, there really is a business standard for prompt replies. If someone goes out-of-office, they are usually expected to put up an "OOO autoreply" that will tell you when they're returning. Because it really is business etiquette to respond promptly, or reset expectations by explain why you'll be late.
jcmfernandes 8mo ago
I'll continue apologizing. I'm very sorry, though.
- networked 8mo ago
  "Sorry, not sorry I'm sorry."
walthamstow 8mo ago
I don't know where the author is from but this goes dead against common courtesy in the UK for sure, and probably similar places like Canada and Japan as well. In Japan you might expect the apology to be longer than the email content.
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
  Thank you. I logged in to say almost exactly that. I was raised with very different cultural norms that are hard to remove. At times, I do come across as overly apologetic based on nothing more than, from my upbringing perspective, being polite.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- alistairSH 8mo ago
  No idea if I'm normal or not (based in the US, with a British family), but if I miss an email by a few days/weeks, I'll just say "sorry for the delay" and jump right into the actual content. And on the recipient side, I don't expect even that. If it was critical, I would have used Slack (or sent a follow-up email if it was something to an external party).
- projektfu 8mo ago
  GOD: Oh, don't grovel. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's people grovelling. ARTHUR: Sorry. GOD: And don't apologize. Every time I talk to someone it's sorry this, and, forgive me that, and, I'm not worthy.
d--b 8mo ago
People who get so annoyed by other people’s habits should really work on themselves rather than writing long blog posts about why others should bend to their own world view. Or at least make it funny.
tmtvl 8mo ago
Is it worse to apologize to one who doesn't want you to do so, or to not apologize to one who _does_ want you to?
- bluebarbet 8mo ago
  Pascal's email wager.
reconnecting 8mo ago
The author is Belgian. But the post is not about how to handle business emails in Belgium, or in general, it's about the author's own preferences in written communication. I don't understand why everyone below is discussing how a person treats his own personal emails.
- NicuCalcea 8mo ago
  You can't really put a strong opinion on the internet, have someone share it on a forum, and expect people not to discuss it.
tsimionescu 8mo ago
I can't for the life of me understand why people think it's OK to send and even expect plaintext email in 2026. There's so much content that requires formatting and non-Unicode support in order to make sense. Formatted text, lists, in-line graphs or images, tables, equations or other mathematical formulae, all of these benefit from a controlled layout that plaintext just doesn't offer or can barely approximate. Why would you limit your email communication like this?
- carlosjobim 8mo ago
  If your e-mail is only text, then it should be plaintext. The receiver knows better than you what kind of formatting she would like to read it in.
  - tsimionescu 8mo ago
    The definition of "text" itself is quite vague. Is a code sample text? What about a series of code samples intercalated with common language descriptions? What about a numbered list? What about a poem? Also, just because I send some text as HTML doesn't prevent in any way the receiver from formatting that however they want. I'm just adding some display hints, that their email client may or may not ignore.
    - carlosjobim 8mo ago
      What about it? Your e-mail composer will tell you when you put something in your message which isn't plaintext and offer to convert your message to HTML for you to keep writing it.
      - tsimionescu 8mo ago
        You were claiming earlier that one shouldn't add formatting to their email, such as emphasizing using italics as it is the recipient who should decide how to format the email text. This is a completely different discussion from whether email that does happen to only require plain text should be sent as plain text or HTML.
frou_dh 8mo ago
On the off-chance I ever do reply to some of the months/years old things that I've never replied to, then I will surely include an apology, because it's definitely rude what I've done. I don't think many people in the real world worship the sanctity of the "Asynchronous Communication" principle above all else. Maybe the author is the 1/1000 that does.
kqr 8mo ago
I get a couple of cold emails a week and I like to be as helpful as I can when people have entrusted me with their opinions/thoughts/concerns/questions. I also often don't find the time to respond until weeks or months later, at which point an apology seems reasonable. I do like the idea of asking the sender to reply a few weeks/months later.
grvdrm 8mo ago
My simple route for handling slow replies: 1. Quick email saying “acknowledge, will work on a reply with estimate target date” 2. Proper reply ideally by target. Guilty as charged.
tristor 8mo ago
As someone who is often late replying to emails and feels compelled to put in an apology, it's because my experience is that most of the folks emailing me (that aren't cold emails, e.g. things related to actual work/activities) are generally expecting a reply within one or two business days, so when it takes me a month to get back to them a brief apology is in order. The apology isn't because I feel I've done something wrong, per se, it's because I know that my timeliness didn't meet their expectations and they may have had to move forward without my input. Sometimes that's fine, sometimes I'm an SME that they need input from and they may have been waiting and my lack of reply was a blocking action. The quantity of apologies I write in email replies is directly correlated to how overworked I am from existing in a reality where the existence of unproven tooling causes more work to be put on my plate without any realistic avenues to manage it. When everything is urgent, it can be impolite to be explicit about your priorities, but waiting to reply implicitly makes the point that something else was more important, and that is something which has political consequences, especially in business. Ultimately, like any element of etiquette, it's about smoothing over the rough edges so we can all get along and to assuage any feelings that the other person may have that they got stiffed. I wish things worked the way the author thinks things work, and maybe it does in the world of academia or wherever this person is insulated from the consequences of late-stage capitalism and the gnat-like attention span that social media has inculcated into the global population. But in the business world, especially in the US, and especially in 2025 onward, there is an expectation that every individual person can do the job of a team of 6, and that responses need to be done with urgency to every missive. That's clearly an unrealistic and unfair expectation, but because all of us want to avoid being starving and homeless, we do our best to meet that expectation anyway, hence why burnout is epidemic and we all hate the current timeline.
Juliate 8mo ago
Lots of opinions either way. What's peculiar is the disconnect in some arguments here. If you are serious and down to business, taking into consideration the cultural bit over the efficiency or value of the relationship is backwards; apart from taking hints about manners and future expectations of communication with your correspondent.
nicbou 8mo ago
I don't think that people are entitled to a quick reply, or any reply at all. Sure, a quick reply is courteous, but not at all an obligation.
phendrenad2 8mo ago
Apologizing for replying late to an email is common practice between colleagues in business, especially if your late reply has blocked that person from doing their job. I don't know who this Ploum guy is, or why he has a nickname, or why French Wikipedia seems to think he's a noteworthy software developer, but I hope for France's sake he isn't actually as influential as he thinks, because this could be disastrous for French-English business communication.
omgJustTest 8mo ago
Thank you!
heyitsdaad 8mo ago
You are talking to a human and they have feelings. They feel guilty for not answering sooner and they are letting that known. It makes life beautiful.
SoftTalker 8mo ago
Old fashioned email etiquette and "netiquette" favored brevity and omission of pleasantries (and trimming quoted messages, etc.) because people were reading on 300 baud dial-up and it made the difference between taking 5 seconds to load your message or maybe a minute or more. It's largely irrelevant for any technical reason today, but the old greybeards still cling to it (I'm one of them).
themafia 8mo ago
> Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable. Get over it. No one is doing it for your benefit. They're providing a secondary signal about their own workload. Just ignore it if you cannot make use of it.
skobes 8mo ago
I mean, it's also an attentional commitment for me to remember your idiosyncratic apology-preferences. So I might continue apologizing for replying late to your email, unless you convince me that _everyone_ doesn't like this...
Peacefulz 8mo ago
I wish I could convince my friends online to fall back on email. So many times the "watering holes" have changed, and I've lost some valuable contacts in the shuffle.
arkmm 8mo ago
Sorry Ploum, just getting a chance to read this now and comment. Great insights!
pickleRick243 8mo ago
Who keeps linking this guy's posts? I don't think I've agreed with a single one of his takes.
ValveFan6969 8mo ago
[dead]
kgwxd 8mo ago
I stopped saying stuff like this out loud because it usually turns into "I know you don't like when... but, [does thing anyway]" and now it's 10 times more annoying.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

229 points by validatori 8mo ago

I do feel there's far too much of a focus on instantaneous response in today's world, both at work and in personal life. If something I can give you is truly preventing you from moving forward then that's fair enough, but otherwise send emails, don't rush the replies, and let people plan their own time.

ggm 8mo ago

A buried appeal to avoid top posting. Good, but like all good things, top posting is why we can't have good things. It isn't going to stop.

ranaexmachina 8mo ago
Bottom posting confuses the hell out of most people. I gave it a try but people kept complaining so I'm back to top posting even though it makes absolutely no sense.
- easton 8mo ago
  Wonder if there's a way to make the popular email clients (outlook/gmail) re-sort conversation view so that the newest reply is at the bottom. then enforce it by policy across the org, and watch the chaos as people read before speaking.
- miroljub 8mo ago
  True. Once a coworker asked me why I was responding with an empty mail since my reply was at the bottom, and he didn't bother to scroll down. Since then, I gave up and just started using conventions everyone else is using. The goal is not purity, but clarity of communications. I even started to avoid inline responses and comments, many find even that confusing.
- Gracana 8mo ago
  Same. I tried really hard to quote properly, because I was so annoyed by the top-posting mess that everyone else did, and it frustrated me that people would add you to an email where you need to read 100 things that came before it (with increasingly garbled formatting) to understand what was going on. I felt people were unwilling to take the responsibility for communicating properly, and so they took the easy route where they could shrug their shoulders and say "I included all the context." I only ever got complaints from people who were confused by the quoting style or didn't know what the email was about. I'm not sure if it's still true, but at the time, Outlook didn't use threaded view mode by default and most people didn't know about it. FWIW I work in manufacturing and not in tech, I expect the level of competence in tech is a little higher, though I also hear how people moan about having to learn the tools they use every day, so maybe there's little difference.
- 1313ed01 8mo ago
  I bottom-post if the other person do so first. That almost never happens these days. I guess if too many do it like that then no one will be the first to bottom-post, even when both would prefer that. Not sure what a good solution would be that did not involve confusing random other people with bottom-posts. I remember around the time top-posting had taken over, someone on a mailing list being upset about having their mail cut up and quoted inline by someone else. Can imagine today many might react like that if they ever encounter nicely formatted mail replies.
- ninjin 8mo ago
  I think our contexts are all different. But, to share a different experience, as an academic (with plenty of conversations involving people in industry as well each year) I have used interleaved and bottom-posting for decades and it causes confusion maybe once a year at most and mostly because Microsoft's online client is broken and at times does not even render anything below "Dear Foo," in the HTML view (got to give this small start up in Redmond some more time though, we can not expect them to implement standards that have only been around for over 40 years).
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  I'm pretty sure that most people are only dimly aware of the existence of the quoted part at the bottom of an email. Mail clients routinely hide it by default, and in most cases it's never needed for anything in today's email conventions. Most clients now group conversations to threads, and most emails aren't long or complex enough to require much context anyway, never mind the custom of interleaving quotes and replies. The vast majority people didn't yet use email back when bottom posting was good etiquette and top posting was discouraged. They're simply not aware of the concepts, or the controversy, at all. Even old-fashioned snail mail letters, for those who still remember such things, didn't usually include quoted passages, even though getting a reply to one's letter could easily take weeks if not months.

sixtyj 8mo ago

E-mail was always asynchronous communication tool. For people who like to see waving three dots in iPhone chat, e-mailing makes them anxious. So I understand that apology is quite normal. It is a sort of generational difference, imho.

gchamonlive 8mo ago
Chats are ambiguous because it functions both as sync and async. I treat my whatsapp messages as async, but time and again I get heat from people because I take too long to reply, something I'll never feel the urge to apologize for.
- coldpie 8mo ago
  I see this in the opposite direction at work. I'll send someone a chat message after their working hours and they'll actually reply apologizing that can't look now and will reply tomorrow. Or that they're just waking up and they'll look later today. Yeah, that's what I expect, I'm not your boss asking you to come in on a Saturday. Why on earth are you looking at your work chat outside of your work hours anyway??
  - nomagicbullet 8mo ago
    They could be giving you a subtle hint to not send messages outside of work hours.
    - coldpie 8mo ago
      I don't know their working hours, we've got staff all over the globe and people work whatever hours they like. I have no expectation for anyone to check work communications outside of their working hours, and it's bonkers to me that people think anyone would have that expectation.
    - prmoustache 8mo ago
      That's weird. When I am off, I don't read those messages anyway. Who would be checking at their messages AND be annoyed at receiving them?

debo_ 8mo ago

> Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable. > It also puts a lot of pressure on me: what if I take more time than you to reply? Isn’t the whole point of asynchronous communication to be… asynchronous? Each on its own rhythm? This one of those sentiments that makes me scratch my head. If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?

46493168 8mo ago
Some of us survive because we have anxiety deeply rooted in a fear of failure. It causes us to be perfectionists. This can look like success for those who hide it well.
- debo_ 8mo ago
  I have been hospitalized and almost died multiple times from stress-related disorders, so I get it. But as soon as I catch myself putting aspects of my health on the behaviour of other people -- especially for something this small -- it's time for me to start looking inwards.
  - slumberlust 8mo ago
    Is it heroic to look inwards?
    - 46493168 8mo ago
      I don't know about heroic, but it's certainly necessary. Nobody is going to look out for you except you. Work will never love you back, your company will take as much as you give it.
some_furry 8mo ago
> If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive? Not the author, but I'd wager it's an evolving story over many years. At first, you ignore it entirely. It might not even register at first, or if it does, it's just a barely conscious "huh, this interaction makes me feel weird" sort of deal. And you leave it be. But then death by a thousand cuts later, you're irritated by this habit and want to speak out against it. And so, you write a blog post about why it's bad or annoying or whatever. And then you go back to surviving another day.

squeefers 8mo ago

does this same guy ruminate when somebody holds a door open for him, or when hes asked how hes doing?

10729287 8mo ago
In my opinion, the example of the door is not very relevant, because it often forces the person behind to run to catch up with the door so that the person in front does not wait too long. For my part, I hold the door as long as possible while walking without turning around, so it is up to the person behind to decide whether or not to run, without putting too much pressure on them.

A_D_E_P_T 8mo ago

In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours. If I get blown off, or if somebody takes 4 days to respond to my email, my impression is always that my counterparty views the matter as unimportant. For my part, if I reply late, and if the matter is genuinely important, I think it's proper and fitting to include a brief note of apology. In email communications with friends, it varies. I'll often let conversations hang for a while until there's something new to discuss.

the_arun 8mo ago
Also Async doesn’t mean delayed forever.
squeefers 8mo ago
i would suspect this flies over the OPs head.
reconnecting 8mo ago
Absolutely! The author doesn't mention what type of communication he means, but for business communications (in Belgium, where the author is from), anything over 24 hours (one working day) must have some explanation. It's always better to explain yourself, otherwise, it looks unprofessional if you reply after a week as though it's normal. Overall, the recommendations about email look very personal to the author and perhaps shouldn't be taken as general advice.
- itopaloglu83 8mo ago
  Maybe on defined routine processes, but otherwise your email has a lower priority, unless it’s an urgent matter.
  - Juliate 8mo ago
    If it's urgent, it's a phone call.
- Gud 8mo ago

tobr 8mo ago

This would be an absolutely savage way to follow up on an email you never received a reply to three years ago.

ziml77 8mo ago

Most people do expect timely replies to emails. If you act like taking days to respond to an email is normal, people will get very upset with you.

falcor84 8mo ago
I won't. Days is ok. For non-urgent emails, I would only be slightly annoyed if it's been more than a week, and I'll then send a reminder. It's ok. I know you're busy, take your time and respond at your convenience.
Sharlin 8mo ago
In most contexts days is perfectly normal, and expecting a faster reply, especially without explaining why it's urgent, is considered impolite. This includes all the cases where the job of the recipient is not literally "reply to e-mails ASAP".
nicbou 8mo ago
Then be upset. Nowhere did I agree to reply to emails quickly, if at all. Your expectations, your feelings, your problem.
- ziml77 8mo ago
  Maybe your context is different, but all I can say is that I used to consider email to be something that you respond to when you get to it. Yet after enough complaints were raised against me I had to change that behavior and reply immediately even if it was just to say "I will look into this". I am not personally upset if people don't get to my emails right away, because if I have anything actually urgent I'll get a Teams message out to the person who I know can handle it. (That does change a bit if the communication to to an external vendor in which case it's going to their support team who I do expect to respond promptly).
  - nicbou 8mo ago
    That was also me, but it became unsustainable. I got a lot of reader mail and had to update my contact page to redirect some of it to other experts. I stopped treating my inbox as an obligation and I reply at my own pace. I still give each email as much consideration as I can, but I no longer feel that it’s required. Some emails go unanswered. I am slowly working on setting boundaries, especially in response to expectations that I did not opt into. It’s indeed a very contextual reply.

brushfoot 8mo ago

What an unpleasant attitude. People have emotions. If they're apologizing, maybe they feel bad. Accept it and get on with your day. A punctilious email etiquette isn't going to improve anything.

falcor84 8mo ago
I actually really liked the post. I'm often prone to apologizing, thinking that it's a social expectation, and the post made me smile and relax a bit, thinking to myself "oh, maybe it's not that important, and it'll be ok if I don't".
j45 8mo ago
Responding too quickly to emails is the same as responding too quickly to IMs, it will often invite more responding.
- bell-cot 8mo ago
  That depends on context, and how you phrase the reply.
jjice 8mo ago
I don't know, it seems pretty light-hearted. If they sent this directly to someone in response to an email, then I may agree, but since it's more of just an opinion blog piece, I find this to be a good outlet for thoughts to share without really impacting anyone.
10729287 8mo ago
Well, to be honest, for a lot of people, apologizing for late answer is more a social convention or a reflex than real apologies. The same for : "How are you ?", "I hope this email finds you well" or worse than everything, Emails Greetings embedded into the signature.
- SoftTalker 8mo ago
  And please remove the multi-paragraph legal disclaimers from your .sig. They are meaningless and annoying.

abcde666777 8mo ago

Apologies for this comment!

mda 8mo ago

Such a weird thing to say, if this makes you uncomfortable, imagine how uncomfortable it makes the other side reading this. It is common courtesy, not a big deal.

falcor84 8mo ago
Common courtesies often have a ratchet effect, only increasing in expectations over time, and we need a correction every once in a while to avoid sinking into the expectation abyss.

pixelmonkey 8mo ago

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.” -Donald Knuth

j45 8mo ago
In that case, emails like IM's can be batched together during a 30 minute block twice a day.
- shepherdjerred 8mo ago
  That’s what he does except it’s every 6 mo https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
atmosx 8mo ago
At that time made sense. It’s clear what he is trying to say: “I won’t engage every excited programmer who wants to know this or that via email, like others tend to do even for little things”. In 2026 email is the most time-respecting communication medium other than a classic, physical letter.
mghackerlady 8mo ago
Knuth is such a wonderful guy, his books are amazing
nicbou 8mo ago
What a clever sentence!

cbondurant 8mo ago

I feel like the lag-time of communication was an important component of older forms of communication that has been lost. That's not to say that fast communication isn't a boon to society, of course. Only that slower communication gives you more flexibility in how you respond, and more time to think about what your response should be. When the main form of long distance communication was the postal system, and letters took days to travel from sender to receiver, you could easily wait days, if not weeks, to draft up your reply and mail it out. The recipient on the other end wouldn't even be able to discern the difference between your delay and the delay from the postal network itself. It had some in-built slack. When the only phones were landlines, if someone called you and you knew you were in a bad mood, the kind of bad mood that would invariably make you say something stupid, you could just not pick up! There were plenty of common, understandable reasons someone wouldn't be available to answer their landline. Then they could leave you a message, and you could call back when you mood improved again. Again, there was slack built into the system. Now there's this cultural expectation that puts far more attention on your reaction speed. A text message with no immediate response could just be them not seeing it immediately... But actually no! Now we have read receipts too! You can't even pretend to have not seen it yet while you think of your reply. Some platforms even have the little "currently typing" indicator tell them how long you've spent drafting and re-drafting whatever message you ended up sending. A panopticon of communication. Now there's no slack. Any person anywhere in the world could try and get a hold of you with the same expectation of immediacy that a face-to-face conversation would supply. Now of course, not every single person I might text, call, or send an email to, will have the same expectations for what is an appropriate degree of responsiveness. But, (speaking from my personal experience) I am absolutely miserable at reading that from social clues. I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations, and that allowing myself to be lax may very well give them a terrible opinion of me. (Though, the degree to which their opinion of me actually matters is a different question entirely!)

quesera 8mo ago
> I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations This is self-defeating. You have the option (and I recommend it) to intentionally adopt the opposite assumption: Zero communication is urgent, unless explicitly described as such. It might be appropriate to make exceptions for certain people. Parents, partners, children. Maybe some work people during a crunch. Maybe some friends going through difficult times.

qwertytyyuu 8mo ago

Reminding you of context is just weird, just scroll down an read you previous email

j45 8mo ago
Reminding of context can be useful to summarize your understanding and what you are responding to. Kind of like LLMs.

RupertSalt 8mo ago

This may be more of a "me problem" than a "them problem". I often have the experience that people apologize for being slow to respond to me. Whether they're on the phone, at a counter in person, or whatever. Sometimes they say "oh dear, this computer is so slow today!" or "please bear with me while I check this..." but many times it is a very pointed and pre-emptive statement that they cannot respond or comply with my request immediately, that it may take X number of hours or days or something. I made a special request to a vendor last year, and the CSR said "oh gosh, we need to reach out to the manufacturer, in Europe, and you know how supply chains are these days... and..." and I literally said "no problem" and eventually, they did not even charge me for the item when it came in, months later. Likewise the dry cleaner always seems to protest that they cannot finish in time and can we please push back the deadline, but I feel like they are trying to shirk my business because they're overwhelmed, too. And I've come to believe that this is mostly the result of me approaching with impatience and anxiety. I often reach a desk while breathless and make my requests more like demands with the utmost of urgency. I am not, in fact, that impatient, but I give that impression and people believe that I would be disappointed if they take too long. But I do tend to interrupt and distract people if they are trying to collect their thoughts, or figure something out. My last supervisor used to do this all the time. Practically every email and every voicemail was followed up with apology for being slow. And I really think that he was very gently telling me not to be so impatient and anxious. But also, there really is a business standard for prompt replies. If someone goes out-of-office, they are usually expected to put up an "OOO autoreply" that will tell you when they're returning. Because it really is business etiquette to respond promptly, or reset expectations by explain why you'll be late.

jcmfernandes 8mo ago

I'll continue apologizing. I'm very sorry, though.

networked 8mo ago
"Sorry, not sorry I'm sorry."

walthamstow 8mo ago

I don't know where the author is from but this goes dead against common courtesy in the UK for sure, and probably similar places like Canada and Japan as well. In Japan you might expect the apology to be longer than the email content.

iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
Thank you. I logged in to say almost exactly that. I was raised with very different cultural norms that are hard to remove. At times, I do come across as overly apologetic based on nothing more than, from my upbringing perspective, being polite.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
alistairSH 8mo ago
No idea if I'm normal or not (based in the US, with a British family), but if I miss an email by a few days/weeks, I'll just say "sorry for the delay" and jump right into the actual content. And on the recipient side, I don't expect even that. If it was critical, I would have used Slack (or sent a follow-up email if it was something to an external party).
projektfu 8mo ago
GOD: Oh, don't grovel. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's people grovelling. ARTHUR: Sorry. GOD: And don't apologize. Every time I talk to someone it's sorry this, and, forgive me that, and, I'm not worthy.

d--b 8mo ago

People who get so annoyed by other people’s habits should really work on themselves rather than writing long blog posts about why others should bend to their own world view. Or at least make it funny.

tmtvl 8mo ago

Is it worse to apologize to one who doesn't want you to do so, or to not apologize to one who _does_ want you to?

bluebarbet 8mo ago
Pascal's email wager.

reconnecting 8mo ago

The author is Belgian. But the post is not about how to handle business emails in Belgium, or in general, it's about the author's own preferences in written communication. I don't understand why everyone below is discussing how a person treats his own personal emails.

NicuCalcea 8mo ago
You can't really put a strong opinion on the internet, have someone share it on a forum, and expect people not to discuss it.

tsimionescu 8mo ago

I can't for the life of me understand why people think it's OK to send and even expect plaintext email in 2026. There's so much content that requires formatting and non-Unicode support in order to make sense. Formatted text, lists, in-line graphs or images, tables, equations or other mathematical formulae, all of these benefit from a controlled layout that plaintext just doesn't offer or can barely approximate. Why would you limit your email communication like this?

carlosjobim 8mo ago
If your e-mail is only text, then it should be plaintext. The receiver knows better than you what kind of formatting she would like to read it in.
- tsimionescu 8mo ago
  The definition of "text" itself is quite vague. Is a code sample text? What about a series of code samples intercalated with common language descriptions? What about a numbered list? What about a poem? Also, just because I send some text as HTML doesn't prevent in any way the receiver from formatting that however they want. I'm just adding some display hints, that their email client may or may not ignore.
  - carlosjobim 8mo ago
    What about it? Your e-mail composer will tell you when you put something in your message which isn't plaintext and offer to convert your message to HTML for you to keep writing it.
    - tsimionescu 8mo ago
      You were claiming earlier that one shouldn't add formatting to their email, such as emphasizing using italics as it is the recipient who should decide how to format the email text. This is a completely different discussion from whether email that does happen to only require plain text should be sent as plain text or HTML.

frou_dh 8mo ago

On the off-chance I ever do reply to some of the months/years old things that I've never replied to, then I will surely include an apology, because it's definitely rude what I've done. I don't think many people in the real world worship the sanctity of the "Asynchronous Communication" principle above all else. Maybe the author is the 1/1000 that does.

kqr 8mo ago

I get a couple of cold emails a week and I like to be as helpful as I can when people have entrusted me with their opinions/thoughts/concerns/questions. I also often don't find the time to respond until weeks or months later, at which point an apology seems reasonable. I do like the idea of asking the sender to reply a few weeks/months later.

grvdrm 8mo ago

My simple route for handling slow replies: 1. Quick email saying “acknowledge, will work on a reply with estimate target date” 2. Proper reply ideally by target. Guilty as charged.

tristor 8mo ago

As someone who is often late replying to emails and feels compelled to put in an apology, it's because my experience is that most of the folks emailing me (that aren't cold emails, e.g. things related to actual work/activities) are generally expecting a reply within one or two business days, so when it takes me a month to get back to them a brief apology is in order. The apology isn't because I feel I've done something wrong, per se, it's because I know that my timeliness didn't meet their expectations and they may have had to move forward without my input. Sometimes that's fine, sometimes I'm an SME that they need input from and they may have been waiting and my lack of reply was a blocking action. The quantity of apologies I write in email replies is directly correlated to how overworked I am from existing in a reality where the existence of unproven tooling causes more work to be put on my plate without any realistic avenues to manage it. When everything is urgent, it can be impolite to be explicit about your priorities, but waiting to reply implicitly makes the point that something else was more important, and that is something which has political consequences, especially in business. Ultimately, like any element of etiquette, it's about smoothing over the rough edges so we can all get along and to assuage any feelings that the other person may have that they got stiffed. I wish things worked the way the author thinks things work, and maybe it does in the world of academia or wherever this person is insulated from the consequences of late-stage capitalism and the gnat-like attention span that social media has inculcated into the global population. But in the business world, especially in the US, and especially in 2025 onward, there is an expectation that every individual person can do the job of a team of 6, and that responses need to be done with urgency to every missive. That's clearly an unrealistic and unfair expectation, but because all of us want to avoid being starving and homeless, we do our best to meet that expectation anyway, hence why burnout is epidemic and we all hate the current timeline.

Juliate 8mo ago

Lots of opinions either way. What's peculiar is the disconnect in some arguments here. If you are serious and down to business, taking into consideration the cultural bit over the efficiency or value of the relationship is backwards; apart from taking hints about manners and future expectations of communication with your correspondent.

nicbou 8mo ago

I don't think that people are entitled to a quick reply, or any reply at all. Sure, a quick reply is courteous, but not at all an obligation.

phendrenad2 8mo ago

Apologizing for replying late to an email is common practice between colleagues in business, especially if your late reply has blocked that person from doing their job. I don't know who this Ploum guy is, or why he has a nickname, or why French Wikipedia seems to think he's a noteworthy software developer, but I hope for France's sake he isn't actually as influential as he thinks, because this could be disastrous for French-English business communication.

omgJustTest 8mo ago

Thank you!

heyitsdaad 8mo ago

You are talking to a human and they have feelings. They feel guilty for not answering sooner and they are letting that known. It makes life beautiful.

SoftTalker 8mo ago

Old fashioned email etiquette and "netiquette" favored brevity and omission of pleasantries (and trimming quoted messages, etc.) because people were reading on 300 baud dial-up and it made the difference between taking 5 seconds to load your message or maybe a minute or more. It's largely irrelevant for any technical reason today, but the old greybeards still cling to it (I'm one of them).

themafia 8mo ago

> Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable. Get over it. No one is doing it for your benefit. They're providing a secondary signal about their own workload. Just ignore it if you cannot make use of it.

skobes 8mo ago

I mean, it's also an attentional commitment for me to remember your idiosyncratic apology-preferences. So I might continue apologizing for replying late to your email, unless you convince me that _everyone_ doesn't like this...

Peacefulz 8mo ago

I wish I could convince my friends online to fall back on email. So many times the "watering holes" have changed, and I've lost some valuable contacts in the shuffle.

arkmm 8mo ago

Sorry Ploum, just getting a chance to read this now and comment. Great insights!

pickleRick243 8mo ago

Who keeps linking this guy's posts? I don't think I've agreed with a single one of his takes.

ValveFan6969 8mo ago

[dead]

kgwxd 8mo ago

I stopped saying stuff like this out loud because it usually turns into "I know you don't like when... but, [does thing anyway]" and now it's 10 times more annoying.

deleted 8mo ago

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