Wandering Thoughts archives

Email is intrusive, and why

Here is something that I've alluded to before: email is quite intrusive (well, at least in my branch of the world). For both technical and social reasons, email messages are far more like (work) phone calls than they are like paper mail.

On the technical side, you get a lot more email than you do paper mail, and it's harder to scan and sort your email than your mail. For example, most paper mail is loaded with cues as to what sort of mail it is, ones that are relatively easy and reliable (at least until scammers start exploiting them by sending out offers that look like invoices). Yes, paper mail would be more difficult to deal with than email if we got as much paper mail as we did email, but we don't; as an aggregate, paper mail is thus less of a burden.

Socially, there's a strong expectation that people will read their email frequently and respond to it fairly rapidly (although this varies a lot from group to group, and I happen to be in a group that expects this). This expectation creates a social pressure to actually be this responsive, and the more responsive you are the more intrusive email is.

(Email is not alone in this. Any medium where you're expected to be responsive is necessarily going to be intrusive.)

This holds true even if you carefully label your email messages as low priority. Unless the recipient's software can automatically sort them into some 'go through once a day' category, they still get interrupted so they can determine if the message is important or not.

How to set up your vacation messages to get thrown off mailing lists

There are at least two ways to set up vacation messages; they can go to the envelope sender (the SMTP MAIL FROM), or they can go to the apparent author of the mail message, usually plucked from the From: header. It's my personal view that mailing list managers should immediately unsubscribe people who have the second sort of vacation message system.

(I admit that I haven't always had the courage to do this for lists that I run.)

It's one thing to harass the list owner with your vacation messages (but it is still a bad idea); the list owner sort of signed up to be harassed by virtue of running a mailing list, and these days most mailing list software probably swallows these messages anyways. But it's another thing entirely to harass people who post to the mailing list with them, because it effectively functions as an unpleasant disincentive to post to your mailing list. Under most circumstances, discouraging people from participating on your mailing list is exactly the reverse of what you want.

(The more people with such vacation messages, the larger the disincentive is.)

Of course, one of the problems with my view is actually finding the people who are doing this. Unless you regularly send email to your own mailing list (and you may not), you're going to have to rely on list members complaining (or reporting) the issue to you. Encouraging them to do so may or may not help.

(If you are designing a vacation message system, please do not ever have it send email to the Reply-To:. If you are ever tempted to do so, just think about what happens when your software is combined with mailing lists that add a mandatory Reply-To: header that points to the mailing list.)