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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.
> In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours.
Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail. [0]
Of course I recognize that email is often used for time-sensitive matters (like scheduling events), but any time I see an email that is likely to require multiple timely backs-and-forths I'll try to move the conversation to a more suitable medium.
[0] Here I'm referring to solicited emails sent by humans or transactional emails triggered directly by a human interaction. In practice our email inboxes also serve as a general "notifications hub" for all sorts of things including recurring events ("remember to pay your bill") and, of course, unsolicited junk.
Have you routinely received letters or bills from bureaucrats?
I can tell you that those banks, government agencies, and hospitals know how to backdate letters, postmark them like clockwork, and land in my mailbox on a Friday at close of business on a 3-day weekend, just to jam us up and narrow any deadline that may exist.
Even a hand-delivered notice from the landlady shows up at 6:01pm when the office is already closed. I guarantee that you will be helpless to respond in a timely fashion.
It has been suggested that "bankers hours" and 9-5 office hours were originated specifically to jam up the working man, who needed to be in the mines or on the factory floor during those hours. If a bank actually wanted to serve working people, they would be open on weekends. Traditionally it was not something your wife or kids could proxy, if they did not drive or have authorization, but the single working man was doubly screwed in these situations.
This year I also have the experience of very premature "billing notices" sent to my email and text and every other place, where the bureaucrats are counting on impatience to pay a bill far too early, before it is due, luring you in with ambiguous wording. People today are warning "do not comply in advance" and I am observing this maxim with health care billing in particular.
I'm confused, are you upset about receiving letters that don't give you enough time to act, or that give you too much time to act?
It's squeezing from both ends.
If a bureaucracy sends out a thing that requires followup/action, and it arrives right before the sidewalks are rolled up, then the citizen is sort of flailing for days. Might even forget to act at 9am on Tuesday. Government websites include a lot of scheduled maintenance. Also, that letter they wrote will be dated at least 10 days before you received it. I carefully staple all correspondence to the envelope with postmarks.
If someone induces me to pay a bill 60-90 days early, that is my loss and their gain. Money in my bank is working for me, available, perhaps earning interest. Money in their bank is sunk. For this reason and others, it can be an error to pay your bills too early.
I recently ordered on Christmas Day from a catalog. They charged my card right away. They still haven't delivered some of the items. Vendors shouldn't be taking your payment until the stuff is shipped. Businesses won't pay invoices until the goods/services are received and verified!
As I said, bureaucracies run like clockwork, and they will always act at the right time and date. It will disadvantage the best of us.
Any office worker knows the difference in character between the email that arrived at 9am on Monday, vs. the memo sent at 11am on Wednesday, or the phone call coming in at 4:59pm on Friday...
yes
I’ve gotten the normal stuff via mail: bills, credit card stuff, DMV, the occasional jury summons. And I’ve also dealt extensively with U.S. immigration, which often requires numerous exchanges via USPS.
And all of these things generally work fine with the assumption that response times will be a couple of days, plus the couple of days in transit.
I can’t say I recall ever encountering mail with a strict deadline very near to when I received it. (Usually the frustration is the opposite: I wish things could move a lot faster than they do.)
> If a bank actually wanted to serve working people, they would be open on weekends.
You do know that people also work in banks, right?
It's about white collar versus blue collar.
White collars have the luxury of limited hours, resting on the weekends, and being able to take time off work when they have an appointment or obligation.
This is absolutely true. When I worked as at a restaurant, the mantra from management was: "You got time to lean, you got time to clean." I've worked a lot of blue-collar jobs before making my way into office work. Blue collar workers will get chided for pulling out their phone. I'm posting this comment to HN on either side of a call that came in while I was reading the thread.
In my first real office job, I grew anxious when someone from down the hall came and conversed with my office-mate for ten minutes. We had all this work that needed to be addressed! I'm obviously acclimated to office culture now; I'm just trying to underscore the difference in work culture for those who may not have worked in physical labor environments. The people working those jobs aren't even an afterthought to many people (which I can attest from having dealt with people who mistreat workers).
Are you trying to say that banks can't be open on the weekends because then bank employees would have to work weekends? Much like any business that operates on the weekends? They would have time off during the week and wouldn't have the issue that people working Mon-Fri have because they could go to the bank on their day off on Tuesday or whatever.
> Are you trying to say that banks can't be open on the weekends because then bank employees would have to work weekends? Much like any business that operates on the weekends?
I'm saying there's a reason not all businesses (or government institutions) work 996[0].
> Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail.
I moved from a company that operated under that paradigm (Slack was the primary mode of internal comms) to one that treats email as the primary mode of comms. It was a minor challenge to start watching my inbox and keep it at zero-unread (something I don't care about at all in my personal emails). Feels natural to me now when I'm in work-mode.
There are only two suitable mediums: E-Mail or phone call.
If you try to contact me with a phone call, you might as well send your message into outer space. You'll have better luck getting a response from aliens.
99% of incoming calls to my phone are spam. I won't pick up an unknown number unless someone has already contacted me and told me to be expecting a phone call, or it's a call from someone I already know (people I already know don't call me either).
That is to say, your mileage may vary on what counts as a "suitable medium".
Used to be that people had phones at the desk at work and a voicemail inbox. In a business situation I would expect most people to be reachable by phone.
I haven't had a phone at work for the last 7 years.
This reminds me: when people insist on having a real phone call in an email, it could be something that they don't like to put in writing. So it's a good practice to ask what the topic of the phone call will be so that you can join it prepared.
If it indeed is something that you feel might be fishy, I further recommend the following: write a summary of what was discussed and send your summary to the people on the call as "meeting minutes -- 2026-02-11" (make this a habit, and always say "I do this routinely to remember what was agreed"). This can easily avoid you being trapped by dubious propsals or being unwittingly on the wrong side of the law.
If you're not reachable neither by phone nor by e-mail, then it's assumed you want to be left alone.
I don't even have a phone at work. Haven't for years.
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async vs sync
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.
Not everyone is glued to their computer.
I don’t owe an explanation to anyone.
> Not everyone is glued to their computer.
That’s what out-of-office automatic replies are for, which will include information on what business day you will be back, and often will also specify who is your substitute while you’re away.
It’s standard practice for B2B communication.
It’s standard practice for people who aren’t out of office 350 days a year…
"Out of office" just means that you don't access your work email. If that's the case for 350 days a year for you, then the discussion is pretty moot anyway.
I do access it, I just don’t have time to reply to non-urgent email within 24 hours…
Maybe on defined routine processes, but otherwise your email has a lower priority, unless it’s an urgent matter.
If it's urgent, it's a phone call.
Different people and different work environments have different rules.'
I view my email once per week. If you need an immediate answer from me, I expect you to send me a slack/chat/pagerduty warning, even one that says "I sent you an email, I need answer by tomorrow".
If you communicate your expectation visibly, then this works. Otherwise not so much.
Even if they communicate visibly it doesn't always work. I don't use slack / pagerduty (not even sure what that is) and I'm not going to install or set up an account on some random proprietary service just to meet the demands of one email recipient. It might be fine in certain contexts (e.g. team members or friends/family who all use the same communication apps) but it breaks down when you're communicating with arbitrary members of the public.
Exactly. But it also works the other way. If you expect people to read your emails within 24 hours, make it very clear that that's a business need. Otherwise some of them will not.
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Everyone thinks that their inquiries are urgent, top priority. That's not always the case, it maybe urgent to you, but not to the other person.
If something is critical, you can communicate via other means: phone calls, SMS, slack, etc.. and even then, there's no guarantee you will get a response.
In business context, I lean the other way, tend to give all parties as much leg room as possible.
I think The Eisenhower Method is a great fit for prioritization.
Airbnb recently sent me a terms change email that doesnt apply for six months and I dont use it anyway, but email headers set it to urgent and important.
It's more like two business days in the academia, and only if a simple response is enough. Complex questions often take longer, because coming up with an answer may take an hour or two of uninterrupted time.
And if it's a cold email requesting something beyond a reply, and you don't have an existing business relationship with the sender, there is no expectation that you respond. An endless stream of requests from less reputable entities is an unavoidable fact of academic life. Such requests often go directly to the spam folder, as people have collectively decided that they are spam and trained the spam filters accordingly. Even if you think your request is legitimate, it can be indistinguishable from spam.
Hear such mixed things on that though, often it's oh academics love to hear someone wants to read their paper, just email them, they'll be only too happy to provide you with a pdf.
So I tried it once; no reply. (A month or two after it was published too, not something that might've been difficult to dig up.) Probably straight to spam.
> In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours.
Sounds funny because I only read mails when someone tell me about them on MSTeams.
Between IM, supports tickets and jira stories I don't really see the point of emails anymore. If it is something that has an SLA tickets seem to be the way to go, if not Teams. If it is an urgent matter, mentioning my name or calling me will be a quicker way to go. Email seem to be in that weird place where some people still seem to want to insert invisible business matters in an ocean of junk and automatized mails/notifications you generally never subscribe yourself but ends up subscribed by default when given access to resources/applications.
(1) I don't have Jira, (2) I don't want to fill out a SLA ticket, (3) I don't use Teams, (4) I don't know your phone number and/or prefer to deal with things in writing.
Email works because: (a) it is ubiquitous, (b) you don't have to pay for some proprietary software to use it, (c) you remain in control of your data (no IM messages suddenly disappearing), (d) you have a permanent, local, copy of what was said in writing, (e) it's often the standard court-recognised form of communication, other than post, for things that matter legally (e.g. sending notices).
That's not to say that email isn't without many defects. But it's still the best we have for many work-related use cases.
> (1) I don't have Jira, (2) I don't want to fill out a SLA ticket, (3) I don't use Teams, (4) I don't know your phone number and/or prefer to deal with things in writing.
You don't know my email address either so that's ok!
Teams may work for your internal messages but if you deal with anyone outside of your own employer email is still the standard for communication. Not every piece of business that gets done fits into a ticket system.
> Teams may work for your internal messages but if you deal with anyone outside of your own employer email is still the standard for communication. Not every piece of business that gets done fits into a ticket system.
Nobody ever expect a reply within 24hour from someone outside of your organization, unless these terms have been set already that you are working on a common project with strict deadlines.
> if you deal with anyone outside of your own employer email is still the standard for communication
I get what you're saying and agree email is almost always the least common denominator between two different organizations.
On the flip side, this can really vary based on the relationship between two orgs and how closely they might work with each other. I've definitely had Teams instances with outside users and Slack channels shared between multiple orgs when there's a lot of close daily collaboration happening.
https://slack.com/blog/collaboration/slack-shared-channels
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/communicate...
Primarily, email gets used for customer-facing comms (they aren't in Jira). It also gets used for lots of system notifications that could probably be moved to Slack, but inertia is a bitch and they remain in email.
Just because one doesn’t see the point doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.
Each communication tool has its strengths, namely managing interruptions.
People using one’s attention as their inbox directly with DM vs a when you can get to it email can be easily mismanaged.
It’s different for each job.
I also find my SMS/iMessage increasingly polluted by companies that have probably discovered that their emails are filtered automatically or otherwise and no one responds to them any longer.
>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
Usually it is unimportant, and the other side is just wasting their time.
24 hours is ridiculous. I spent over 3 hours replying to emails yesterday and didn’t get through them all. And now I’m even more backed up on projects.
I think this really depends on your role. I don't get enough emails in a day to require 3 hours of replies.
More generally, though, the response can be as simple as "We have received this email; the request will take some time, here's roughly when you can expect an update."
I’ve tried this but then I’m under pressure to get someone a response by a self imposed arbitrary deadline.
I think the cultural norm is to respond as quickly as possible. Realistically that is so challenging.
It's like everything else, it depends
If I ask a quote, get it, and answer only 2w later, I will probably apologize. If someone sends me a quote unprovoked, they shouldn't have any expectations of getting an answer, and if I answer even late, I won't apologize.
If my boss or people working on my project send me an email to get a status on something and it takes me a week to answer, I'll apologize- even if that's because I was busy on something more important. If a random colleague asks me for something unrelated with my direct responsibilities, similarly I'll get to it if I get to it when I get to it, and I dont think they should have expectations of receiving an answer, so I won't apologize
I think that for many cases that should be modified from 24 hours to by the end of the next business day. I feel no obligation to reply on a Sunday to someone who emails me on Saturday or late Friday. They can wait until Monday.
You are conflating important with urgent. Something might be very important, but not urgent.
I might be slower to reply to something important because I need the time to get the reply right.
This must be why so many spammers now have automation set up to send me the first spam, then a second a day later asking if I got the first one, then a third to ask if I am still interested or willing to let their exciting opportunity to pass by. And then restarting the pattern in a month or so.
I am a site test engineer. I am also the primary contact for site test related questions internally for our factory and from customer and colleagues.
If your question needs a answer within 24 hours , give me a call and I will do my best to answer. If you send me an email, without any clear urgency, I will respond when I have time. Typically within a week.
My rule is: 2 business days if I know you, 2-4 business days if I don’t know you but you are offering something of actual value to me, up to infinity for everyone else. I only offer an apology for the first group.
This was previously true but no longer. Anyone who sends an email instead of a DM for something requiring a 24 hour turn around bears the responsibility for any resulting delay in 2026.
24 hours -> 1 business day
don't expect replies over weekends and holidays
Also Async doesn’t mean delayed forever.
Yeah, dude, but sometimes I do consider the matter unimportant, and it's a useful signal to send to the other person.
Your important might not be mine, and that's perfectly fine. Professionals negotiate that difference, instead of unilaterally deciding the other is blowing them off.
i would suspect this flies over the OPs head.
It can be common courtesy as long as the other party is not feeling entitled to one's time and attention.
“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
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.
Knuth is such a wonderful guy, his books are amazing
What a clever sentence!
In that case, emails like IM's can be batched together during a 30 minute block twice a day.
That’s what he does except it’s every 6 mo
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.
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.
I think there is a cultural gap. He mention not only apologizing but giving explanations.
For instance my observation is that people in the USA will tend to give you a lot of unrequested information like all their health/medical problems or the sports games of their kid and what not. People in europe seems to be more private unless they are talking with very close coworker they would consider as friends.
I agree that the apologies tend to make one a little uncomfortable. This is because people do not simply say, "I am sorry I did not have time to write sooner. Here is my response", but instead say, "I would have written but my child was sick, etc.," so you feel the need to respond to that, and feel bad for having bothered them.
Almost nobody writes, "I am sorry I was scrolling Twitter and Hacker News while ignoring my e-mail. Fortunately, I have stopped and now can respond!"
I write no more than either, "Apologies for the delayed response," or "Apologies for the delayed response, I've been out of the office unexpectedly." Very business-like. Tone neutral. Easy to digest and move on.
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".
The author does not seem to be advocating in favor of punctilious etiquette so much as simply getting the point.
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.
And please remove the multi-paragraph legal disclaimers from your .sig. They are meaningless and annoying.
Responding too quickly to emails is the same as responding too quickly to IMs, it will often invite more responding.
That depends on context, and how you phrase the reply.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
For me the point is that if you feel uncomfortable over something that is widespread and considered normal social etiquette, it's on you to deal with feeling uncomfortable, and you can't really expect everyone else to change their behaviour just for you.
There is no set of "normal" things that a large majority of people all share. You can do things you consider normal without being a defensive asshole about it when it negatively affects somebody else (and vice versa, but I'm responding to you, not the OP).
Replace normal with common, and my original comment stands. In many cultures people often casually say "how is it going?" when they don't mean it literally and they are just expecting a token "good, you?" in response. Some people might view it as unnecessary and insincere, but they don't generally go around lecturing others and telling them not to do it. When you're faced with a harmless cultural behaviour like this, the polite thing to do is just accept it and move on with your life.
Culture (and the norms that emanate from it) are a thing that exists. They may be localized to certain communities, but they’re not something you can deny the existence of.
> For me the point is that if you feel uncomfortable over something that is widespread and considered normal social etiquette, it's on you to deal with feeling uncomfortable, and you can't really expect everyone else to change their behaviour just for you.
Ah, the classic "fuck the neurodivergent" stance.
I think the poster above may have accidentally worded their response a little too personally, but their point is valid and not against neurodivergent people (or, at least, there is a version that is close to their argument that is so).
It's perfectly fine to ask people to change be careful in their correspondence to a specific person to avoid certain issues.
It's not fine, however, even for neuro divergent people, to expect social norms to change for everyone to match their particular preferences.
If we read the original article as representing a request from the author to specifically not answer emails to them by apologizing for replying late, that's a perfectly fine request that anyone corresponding with them should follow (once they become aware of it). If we read it as a general recommendation to everyone to change this clear social norm, then it's not fine, the justification given (one person finds this puts some kind of pressure on them, and others might too) is not strong enough to warrant everyone else changing their behavior pre-emptively.
You're taking my comment out of context. This isn't about neurodivergents, it's about someone who thinks everyone should conform to his highly detailed rules (the article isn't only about not apologising - he has other demands on structure, content, and even plaintext vs html) when sending him emails.
No, it's a fatigue of entitled people who react irrationally and think society should pander to their psychological quirks. Or worse, those who enjoy manipulating others by taking offence. A reddit / bluesky self diagnosis of "neurodivergent" doesn't entitle one to be an asshole.
Please describe the alternative stance, and how it scales to societies and casual acquaintences.
He can just stop using e-mail if he has such disturbances. This is like somebody freaking out because their neighbour said hello.
Or a bird chirped in a tree, or whatever triggers hackers to loose their mind nowadays. Maybe some branches moved in the wind.
Who keeps linking this guy's posts? I don't think I've agreed with a single one of his takes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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).
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.
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!)
> 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.
And still, we apologised ('I hope this find you well' and so on). It's cruft, it's slack, and it's social. We need some anchors to hang our message on. We know when it's necessary and when it isn't, and by breaking conventions we relay intent ('sorry not sorry').
Sorry Ploum, just getting a chance to read this now and comment. Great insights!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
They could be giving you a subtle hint to not send messages outside of work hours.
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.
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?
Reply time to instant messages is extremely context sensitive. If I'm having a chat catching up with an old friend I haven't talked with much in a while, I might take several hours to a day or two to write the next message. If I take a day or two to reply to my spouse's inquiry of "what is the plan for dinner tonight?" or "you need to pick up the kids from school today, ok?" I'll have some problems!
Your kids getting picked up shouldn't depend on you seeing an instant message, that should probably be agreed upon the previous day. Sure, emergencies happen, in which case you can't really be held responsible. But if that happens more often than not, that's bad parenting.
Or maybe your agreement with your spouse is to communicate over instant message about managing these daily tasks, in which case it's ok, but you better crank that notification sound all the way to 11 LOL
Ok, feel free to rephrase "you need to" to "will you", and have the only real reason why you didn't respond be because you just didn't feel like responding at that moment. It'll still be frustrating having the other party just be willfully absent to the conversation.
My point is, there are types of messages which are highly time sensitive to the point where the response is meaningless past a certain point, and to many in this day and age instant messaging is the format for such inquiries to be made. Sure, one could be busy and be unable to respond, and one should be understanding of that. But it the reason why my spouse was unreachable was because they didn't bother responding to me at that moment to an obviously important time critical message we've got some problems in our relationship to figure out.
> My point is, there are types of messages which are highly time sensitive to the point where the response is meaningless past a certain point
Ah yes, understood. That makes total sense. In fact I was thinking about a practical system that could be used to bypass silent modes and do not disturb configs for such emergencies. Back when MSN was a thing you had a buzz button that would play an alarm, vibrate the chat window and steal the window focus. It was as amusing as it was annoying, but there are practical uses for this.
I took a day off texting to sleep and recover from an injury, and the woman I was seeing (in her 30s) threatened to delete our chat because she assume I was mad and ignoring her.
She's part of a certain digital generation, and expectations change.
A younger PM I'm working with right now emailed me twice in a few hours because I didn't immediately sign into their management platform after our 4pm meeting. Granted, that's her job, but the project doesn't officially start for a few more months.
If I did that to my wife without telling her she would probably assume I was avoiding her for some reason. But that's more a factor of how often we normally communicate, and if I depart from that she infers that there's something wrong.
i'd try to find out what is behind the reaction of the woman you are seeing. threatening to break up is in itself unhealthy for any relationship. if my partner thinks it is ok to make such threats then i'd end the relationship right there. if we are married then the next step is marriage counceling.
That's a really rigid way of thinking about it. Relationships are a negotiation, and if you stay in a committed one long enough you're going to find yourselves navigating some of these issues. If I'd only been seeing someone for a few weeks and their usual pattern was constant, immediate contact I'd assume there was something wrong. Some people tend to assume further that the problem is their fault. But that's a conversation you can have with your SO without giving them a counter-ultimatum.
assuming something wrong is fine, even getting upset is ok, feeling hurt, and expressing that is also ok, it's a misunderstanding after all. these things happen. but the next step is to talk about it. what is wrong is to immediately threaten to breakup without finding out what the problem is.
if you are sending me a message that says: answer or i'll delete this chat, which means break up, and i am not even able to see the message, let alone respond, so i have no clue whats going on, then i effectively learn that you don't trust me and that you'll assume the worst whenever something happens. that's a character trait that i can't handle. which means we are not fit to be together.
you are right, as in your other comment that this depends on established communication patterns, and if i know that my partner gets anxious when i don't respond quickly enough then, like you suggest i'd let my partner know in advance. but you could also have a situation where you can't do that. the phone breaks, you get into an accident, or you are so sick or tired that you fall asleep before you have a chance to send a message...
i would not respond with a counter-ultimatum. that's the thing. ultimatums should never be used in a relationship. breaking up is a step i would take after the conversation, if i come to the conclusion that my partner thinks it is ok to threaten me like that. i had a partner do that to me three times over the course of half a year. after the third time i had enough. i realized that this is part of her usual behavior, and she will continue doing that whenever something upsets her to much. she refused counseling too. so i said good bye, we are not fit for each other. i never threatened to leave myself. i tried to find out what is upsetting her and resolve it. i had to realize that this was part of her character and that i would not be able to keep going. i had no motivation to try to change her. that's generally futile anyways.
> generational difference
I feel squeezed in the middle between antsy-verbose zoomer emailers and terse boomer emailers that hit me with ambiguous 5 word replies or those godforsaken emojii email reacts.
My decree is that 95% of emails should be three sentences double-spaced. 5% should be paragraphs. Hypertext is permissible almost entirely because of quote formatting, which should be used liberally so that each email is as self-contained as possible.
You do not need hypertext to prefix lines with "> ".
Verbose zoomers and super-terse boomers? I'd expect the opposite, if anything.
Everything is asynchronous but face-to-face, phone and video call.
I cut every communication tool settings that enable online status or "typing..." information. It sets unreasonable expectations no one should have (but in contextual requests on the spot).
written letters are asynchronous but people expected timely (relative to snail mail) replies even back then.
I am pretty sure this is not true.
I recall my mother’s family conversing via mail in the early 80’s - and she would write one 10 page letter a month as a reply (max) - that would 3 or 4 mails a year with any particular sibling (and probably 1 phone call - but phone calls to alaska were expensive, and you wouldn’t say all you wanted to).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Reminding you of context is just weird, just scroll down an read you previous email
Reminding of context can be useful to summarize your understanding and what you are responding to.
Kind of like LLMs.
I'll continue apologizing. I'm very sorry, though.
"Sorry, not sorry I'm sorry."
does this same guy ruminate when somebody holds a door open for him, or when hes asked how hes doing?
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.
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.
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?
Pascal's email wager.
This would be an absolutely savage way to follow up on an email you never received a reply to three years 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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".
Then be upset. Nowhere did I agree to reply to emails quickly, if at all. Your expectations, your feelings, your problem.
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.
> 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.
Thank you!
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.
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.
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.
Apologies for this comment!
Crafted by Rajat
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