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Comment by ormaaj | Hacker News Reader

It is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters and use your tools to organize your workflow in such a way that you do not miss important emails. Your failure to do so is your own failure. If you fail to see my email because you have a laughably amateaurish gmail-based workflow consisting of a single 100k-message inbox, then please, kindly fuck off. You're not worth my time. The notion that a message "must not be important because they only sent one" is absolutely hilarious!

If I don't reply to your message, it's because I feel there is no need to reply or because I'm ignoring you. Sending multiple such "did you get my email?" followups will land you in the kill file.

protip: I whitelist signed and / or encrypted emails and they go to the top of the queue. Spammers never PGP. Marketers and slimy recruiters can't be bothered to look up a public key. Easy way to get my attention.

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That's an interesting approach.

When I did my first startup, I landed my first seven figure deal because I'd done the research to know someone needed my product. But they were too busy to respond.

I regularly followed up over six months by both email and phone. I knew they needed it. But I also know that people tend to prioritize their days by what fires are burning and need to be put out.

Eventually I bothered them enough that they realized they should do something to get me to go away. I guess I became the fire they needed to put out. Only then did they actually process anything I'd sent enough to realize it was something their Fortune 500 client actually did need, and that they'd look great by proposing it.

They wound up being my biggest client and helped make my startup profitable.

I could have said: Mr. Potential Client, I'll send you one email. If you don't configure your mail filters and organize your workflow properly, well, "fuck off."

If I did, I wouldn't have likely gotten any of my clients. Then I could explain the outcomes to my investors: "Well, I sent them an email. They failed to read it!"

The point is that if you want to persuade other people to see things your way, your approach doesn't survive first contact with reality. That's OK: your job may not be that, and it probably works just fine if you only deal with incoming requests. There's just going to be a limit to what you can do.

sounds like survivor bias

Not even that.

This anecdote is a simple cost-benefit play. Playing the lottery makes sense with certain odds.

Sounds like common sense.

again we are confusing the. concepts of responcibility and best practice.

it's best practise to vet the builder to make sure i get someone who does his job properly. its best practice fpr a war correspondent to wear body armor, and to avoid dodgy beighbourhoods on the way home

but its tjr builders responsevility to do his job properly and not to defraud you, a reporter is not at fault for getting shot and it's not my responsebility not to get mugged

The applicability of your metaphor to the conversation at hand may not be as clear to others as it is to you.

I think the problem is that what is important to the sender is not necessarily important to the receiver. I am not Travis of Uber, but I do have expertise in a domain such that I frequently get people reaching out to me to solicit advise or answers to a question.

It is very important to the person asking the question that they get an answer. It is less important to me that they get an answer, and so if I'm busy at the moment those emails won't get a response. I do wish more people followed up though, because I do wish to help; the more they follow up without getting angry or hurt, the more likely they are to reach me at a time when I am able to help.

Oh, FFS, if you want to help, then stick unimportant mail in a "maybe when I get around to it" queue. Don't ask/train people to be obnoxious.

There are two different types of "receives a lot of email". The first type makes up the bulk of the people who receive a lot of email, and that's the type where almost all of the email isn't actionable. Newsletters, receipts, spam, etc. Anything sent in bulk.

The second type is people who receive a lot of correspondence – people expecting a response, or otherwise need action.

The people who claim that it is the receiver's responsibility to process all of their email almost exclusively fall in to the first type, because nobody who falls in to the second type can reasonably process it all.

Telling people they should follow up just makes the problem worse and creates more email to process.

Surely something like a contact form could put any correspondence in some kind of queue that a person could just get to as they have time, instead of just using email directly. Or having an email account just for correspondence with the public so it isn't mixed with other types of email. Then just time block some time to reply to people each week.

"because nobody who falls in to the second type can reasonably process it all"

Then hire a secretary to manage the inflow of data sent to this person, or maybe change the org structure so that the individual needs less direct correspondence. Frankly people are trying to fix systemic not-enough-time-single-point-of-failure org structures with process Band-Aids that only lower the net productivity of everyone involved.

I’m just a guy who built a thing that people want to use and have questions about, not an org to fix. I think many people who “suffer” from lots of requests are the same. I wish I could charge enough for my help to justify a personal secretary!

Then you put them all in a "someday" folder and work FIFO through that. Offer a way to pay for direct solicitation. Those who pay get preferential attention, otherwise you get to it when you get to it.

Yes. Email is generally best-effort response and people need to be understanding. It's not even always the best tool for the job.

UNLESS dealing with email is your primary job responsibility. Then I would fully expect you to have your act together.

well then you just can't process all the emails. It does not matter if people send follow ups, you are just changing the portion that do gey responces.

You misunderstand. I don't think it's your responsiblity to "process all of your email". You're free to ignore any cold email.

I do think it's your responsibility not to encourage people to spam everybody else, even if getting repeated requests so you can "help people when you're not busy" tickles your ego. If you don't want to help them with whatever it is you do, let them go somewhere else.

You are also making yourself busier, which kind of makes a person question your sanity if you really are busy already. Even ignoring a message is an effort.

> then stick unimportant mail in a "maybe when I get around to it" queue. Don't ask/train people to be obnoxious

Do enough people not have conversation threading that this is an issue? One unread message takes up no more room in my inbox than three unread messages in one conversation.

That principle certainly applies to spam. The messages there are "I want to sell you something," and "I am not particularly interested in buying that thing."

This is an important distinction I think.

I generally coach people who email regularly to explain the why behind a question or the value to them of me answering.

If your consistently failing an audit because I am ignoring you then you you can have an answer.

> Sending multiple such "did you get my email?" followups will land you in the kill file.

Since you have distinct rules about communicating with you, and believe in organizing your workflow, I assume you have something that autofires when someone first reaches out to you explaining the rules? Or do you expect them to live up to your communication standards that are not in alignment with the industry standards?

> protip: I whitelist signed

Real protip: Protips are supposed to be generally applicable. Unless you're Mark Cuban or PG or similar, "protip, here's how best to get in touch with me" is just misusing the phrase.

> Or do you expect them to live up to your communication standards that are not in alignment with the industry standards?

The parent IS talking about standards by saying:

i. If you miss an email because you don't manage your inbox, then it's not my job to follow-up.

ii. If I don't respond to an email, then don't expect a response.

Of course, there are exceptions [to the standards] if you need to follow-up with your CEO or if your mom calls.

Yes. Email on the internet is still best-effort delivery after all. If someone suspects an email somehow didn't get delivered that's a whole different situation.

Whether or not a response is expected depends on whether the respondee made their expectation clear, if it isn't implicitly clear given context. Otherwise response is at the discretion of the responder.

Like duh right? I'm remarking for the benefit of those that haven't yet had much exposure to discourse particularly among computing professionals on the internet. Expect for people to vary in their expectations, but this attitude of entitlement, expecting others to "earn" their attention is completely back-to-front. That burns people every time, and they're usually oblivious to it happening.

I'm speaking specifically to and from the perspective of what I expect to be the majority of HN readership - those deeply involved with matters concerning the technology space. So no, what I said isn't applicable to the wider readership of this blogger, that would be mere "best practice". But I think most readers here don't need to be clued in about what constitutes protip-ness.

I was actually clueing you in on a protip, as most people I know don't encrypt emails and I wonder what percentage of mail you receive went through PGP. I advise people to follow up with me, and would rather they sent three mails instead of one.

My point is you seem to think most people are like you, but I don't think even in the tech space that that is true. If you were (maybe you are, I don't know) important enough putting out your "rules to contact me" is sufficient. Otherwise, it's judging people harshly for following what we have decided is a best practice.

Sure I have no qualms about disregarding common practice in certain domains, but it doesn't matter. I don't invent rules that impose unreasonable expectations on others. My expectations are extremely minimal, in contrast with the rest of the planet, evidently.

I didn't say that a sizable percentage of people do that, nor do I expect it. (I do get a sizable percentage of PGP and S/MIME messages, for reasons that don't matter, and I would not expect that to be a norm outside certain contexts). People are reading too deeply into that.

> I have no qualms about disregarding common practice in certain domains

That's not relevant. You said you judged by (and blocking!) other people for following common practices when dealing with you. How are they supposed to know you are one of the minority who doesn't expect a follow up?

I think auto sending an email explaining that you don't like follow ups to people who reach out for the first time would be a good practice on your part

You're completely missing the power dynamic the article is talking about.

You don't send a track to a record label's A&R and then dismissively say "they're not worth my time" when they don't respond. You don't contact VCs asking for a coffee meeting to pitch your startup idea and say "your inbox management sucks, not worth my time" if they don't get back to you in three days.

This is about getting the attention of someone who is very busy and would likely doing you a favor (or buying something from you, or investing in you).

Agreed - I think a lot of responses in this thread get it exactly right.

The assumption from the OP is that they are in position of power (however defined), and that "it's no skin off their back" if somebody's request is missed. They have the luxury to adopt a (to others seemingly) random and specific uncommunicated threshold, and enforce it.

That is true, in a very specific subset of cases and situations.

That is empathically not true, in a very large set of cases and situations.

If you are the one sending the email, then typically you are the one that wants/needs something, ergo you are typically the one that is responsible to get it done / follow-up. That's a generalization but a useful one.

(In particular, the notion of "if you follow up several times, you're going into kill file" is again only applicable for a very specific set of situations. Your boss, client, spouse, friend, partner, lover, lawyer, parole officer, tax auditor, teacher, et cetera would probably not react kindly to enforcement of such rule).

It's not a power thing.

Disagree, or at least we are misunderstanding each other.

I am not saying you are gleefully abusing power or going ona power trip. I am saying there's implicit power in your suggestion / preference.

If you work for a large company, you don't get to put your boss in a kill file because they emailed you a few follow ups. There's any number of situations where that's an unthinkable option.

Consciously or not, you are assuming position of power over the sender. That you don't need them and you aren't negatively impacted by enforcing arbitrary and draconian thresholds. As I said in my examples, most of us likely would not be that non chalant in situations where we do not have the power.

Boss would have to have really stepped way over the line to cross the "ignore" threshold. If I were not in a position to do anything about it I'd ideally be looking for another job before reaching that point.

If you're someone's boss then my expectations of your ability to conduct yourself professionally in everyday email correspondence is higher not lower.

There do exist certain technologies and practices that do in effect impose draconian power over the sender. What I do is not one of them, and if I were to become aware of anything I do to inadvertently impose on others then I would take extraordinary steps to avoid it.

... in other words, it's about hounding somebody who evidently does not want to do you a favor in the hope that you'll get them to do it anyway.

The whole inbox management question is a distraction. You can't guess what's going on with somebody's inbox management.

You can make a pretty good guess that if they don't answer you, they either don't want to talk to you (in which case you should leave them alone), or they have some kind of weird power complex and get off on you begging (in which case you should run far away and find ANY OTHER WAY to get what you need from SOMEBODY ELSE).

Choose the simplest explanation of someone not responding to your email:

1. they don't want to talk to you 2. they have a weird power complex and want you to beg 3. they missed the email or forgot to follow up

2 makes way too many assumptions, we can eliminate it. I'm confused you made a point about not guessing someones inbox management, but then guess at their deep psychological state.

1 and 3 are pretty equal if you assume people are organized on average, otherwise 3 has the edge if you believe the average person is disorganized.

The problem with 1 is you trade maybe not bothering someone for lots of opportunity cost for you.

I'd also argue many software engineers default to 1 because of the anxiety of potential conflict and/or imposter syndrome.

> You can make a pretty good guess that if they don't answer you, they either don't want to talk to you (in which case you should leave them alone), or they have some kind of weird power complex and get off on you begging (in which case you should run far away and find ANY OTHER WAY to get what you need from SOMEBODY ELSE).

... or, as the article says, they're just busy and/or have poor inbox management. It even has real examples of repeated follow-up emails working.

The power dynamic is important. A substantial part of my job is getting answers or actions out of busy people who are above me on the totem pole. When the recipient is more important than you, it doesn't matter if they have poor inbox management. It's on you to communicate in whatever way gets your desired result. That may mean following up with multiple E-mails. It may mean chats. It may mean a phone call or face to face conversation. You have to adapt to the recipient.

If I send a busy manager an E-mail asking for information or for approval to do something or whatever, and they don't respond, it could be any of:

1. They have poor inbox management and missed it

2. They go through their E-mail infrequently

3. They don't care as much as I do, or have no incentive to respond

4. They don't want to do what I'm asking for

5. They don't like me and actively don't want to help

The reason doesn't matter. In all cases, I didn't do my job (get whatever it is I need), and so it is still my responsibility to follow up and either hound more, change my communication style, address whatever problem prevents them from engaging, or whatever it takes. If I fail to get an answer, the consequences are not on them, they're on me.

> It is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters and use your tools to organize your workflow in such a way that you do not miss important emails. Your failure to do so is your own failure. If you fail to see my email because you have a laughably amateaurish gmail-based workflow consisting of a single 100k-message inbox, then please, kindly fuck off. You're not worth my time. The notion that a message "must not be important because they only sent one" is absolutely hilarious!

I do this and still miss emails. Checking my email is mixed in with other activities and inputs in my daily life:

- Coding

- Scheduled meetings

- Unscheduled meetings

- Organizing the team

- Providing support for customers

- Responding to chat messages

- Responding to emails

I've had people try to moralize my inbox, the way you did here, and when I tried to think of ways to make it better I realized the only way for me to do that is to subtract from other activities. Personally, I think your take is fairly selfish, but mainly because you moralized it - and to the degree with which you did, not because you're advocating filters.

Personally, I'd suggest taking a step back and thinking about that communication is the result of a system of incentives. You can't moralize/pressure people into adhering to your preferred communication. It's about finding somewhere that someone can be reached and being persistent enough to reach them.

Email pollution is a real thing. Any meaningful conversation between 4 people has cc going at least 1 if not 2 levels up. Apply that at scale and I have seen Directors with hundreds of conversation threads each day. There is a duty for them to be in-the-loop as in notified, but if you place an action item for them in an email and expect them to respond to your pressing concern of the day without some out of band followup to to flag that particular email, then protip: don't tick it off your highly optimized workflow when you hit send.

This is why intra-org comms should go through something like Zulip.

It is easy for others to follow asynchronously and posts tend to get automatically categorized by senders if people responsible for channels yell at people to categorize properly in the first couple weeks until it becomes a second nature for everybody.

Old topics just die and dive deep in the menu, waiting to be resurrected by automatic suggestions when someone tries to invent a name for a topic.

Everyone sees where the need to catch up and they can easily dismiss channels where they follow just a single topic or so.

Then that person needs to coach offenders, and senders need to be explicit/clear when something is an action item vs an FYI. If that Director is truly needing to be in the loop and take action on so much email that they cant keep up then there needs to be a person hired to manage that.

> it is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters and use your tools to organize your workflow in such a way that you do not miss important emails

Email is a tool. Different people use it differently. No need to get moralistic about it. I’m not going to make my inbox the centre of my life or even work day. It’s presumptuous to assume everyone else must adopt a workflow that works for you.

You're applying an inconsistent standard here.

> No need to get moralistic about it. [...] It’s presumptuous to assume everyone else must adopt a workflow that works for you.

The premise of this discussion is a post titled "It is your responsibility to follow up".

Different people work different ways. But if email is a part of your work, then part of your job is handling your email in a reasonable fashion. Asking other people to work around your broken workflow (send it N times because I can't keep track) is unprofessional.

Email isn't about you. It's about you communicating with other people. If your way of handling email hinders that, then your way of handling email is broken.

Now, if other people are seeking free, unsolicited help from you, then yes, expecting you to have your email set up to work for their email is... unreasonable.

Dunno, this thread really puts words in people's mouths.

TFA is about the fact that emails fall through the cracks and that following up is a good idea.

This can even happen to work emails, but I don't think any of the examples in the blog post are work related.

Whether the receiver has a catastrophic organization failure or whether it's a one-off accident doesn't seem relevant to me beyond couching some lectures in these threads to hypothetical people: in either case it is a better assumption to go "I should follow up" vs "there must be a reason they never got back to me, so I won't."

This is good advice beyond email. Dating is another place this comes up. It serves you better to politely follow up than to assume someone is avoiding you the second it may seem like it.

Meanwhile, "Oh, she got distracted and never responded?! Pfft, well she should get more organized if she wants to talk to me!" is kind of the vibes I get from this thread. While that's fine, to be clear, you may also be missing out if that is your default mode.

Back when professional communication consisted of memos and letters on paper, it was reasonable to expect a recipient to read most or all of them (even then, departmental/company-wide memos sometimes fell through the cracks) because it was much harder to physically produce and send an overwhelming volume to any one person and there was a real financial cost to doing it.

Email is fundamentally broken in the volume of messaging it allows at no costs. All inbox schemes, filters, auto-categories, etc. are just band-aids on the fundamental problem.

Charge the sender something close to a first-class postage stamp for each email sent, and you'll see email get productively useful.

email something blockchain something

This is entirely unrealistic and totally detached from reality. Someone like Travis Kalanick simply cannot reply to everyone who emails him. He literally wouldn't have enough time to do that if he just replied to emails 24/7/365, along with the work associated with replying to those emails, which is often way more than the time to write a response.

The truth is, most people don't value your time because you don't deserve their time. I don't mean this in a moralistic or judgmental way. It's just reality--they don't know you. If I emailed Mark Cuban, the President of the United States, or Jeff Bezos and they didn't respond to me, that doesn't make them conceited jerks who "aren't worth my time" and it doesn't make me any less of a human being. There's no need to get emotional or moralistic about this.

When it comes to trying to get in touch with someone whose attention is valuable, it's best to put your ego aside.

If you're talking about someone who in theory "should" respond to you (a coworker that you have a dependency on, for example), what you said makes more sense. But the conclusion of "they're not worth my time" because they missed your email or forgot to respond to it is ludicrous. Imagine your colleague emailed you, and because you're a busy person, you didn't respond (I'm sure that's happened at least once in your life). Then later they told you to "kindly fuck off" as they passed you in the hallway. How ridiculous would that be?

Wait, the OP is clearly describing a case where the sender is much lower on a power dynamic and trying to meet a much higher person, like a CEO of a unicorn.

The CEO of a unicorn absolutely has no responsibility to configure her mailbox so that randos can ask for advice in a way that grabs her attention. She does have the responsibility to configure her inbox so she doesn't miss board emails though!

Whoever has less power has the responsibility. If the IRS sends you a notice about an audit or something (just as an example), and you miss that because of an unorganized inbox, that's on you. If an entrepreneur emails you for capital and you don't respond, that's on them to follow up.

If the "IRS" is sending you an email, you're probably being scammed. The real IRS sends letters, via traditional post.

In fact, the IRS seems to be anti-technology IMO. IRS.gov has the dumbest password policy I have ever encountered. In your password, you must use subset of 8 special characters, but only once, and it can't be at the beginning or the end of the password. Of course they won't explain that requirement, they will just happily tell you that your password is not valid until you give up. (hopefully this is no longer the case)

Was just an example. But point still stands with snail mail which many people (myself included) don't go through all that carefully.

> It is _your_ responsibility to configure your mail filters

It may very well be, but if you _have to_ reach someone who did not, following up sounds like a good advice to me.

Right, and you should almost certainly go alternative routes instead of repeatedly emailing in that case.

Good for you. Enjoy not being able to contact busy people like Travis Kalanick.

I don't want to contact him, personally, but your argument is delusional and unadaptive.

If you refuse to interact with anyone who hasn't managed to build good email habits you're going to miss out on interacting with a lot of interesting people.

Lol, someone has never seen WAY too many emails despite having good filters.

Had the same reaction and don't forget to add phone calls + whatsapp messages + probably whole days of back to back scheduled meetings.

I am not saying phone calls/whatsapp messages from friends but business related.

There is no magic productivity tool that helps with that.

You forgot to mention your best filter for not getting a flooded inbox: being a hostile person.

Ha, perfect. That person is so angry and entitled to say f-off if you don't do what I say.

I think people don't read replies. :/

That's a very hostile attitude. Other people will have opposite ways to find important email, "important people" to you might not know about your special way to be connected. Your way is not the only way.

Email filters don’t work if the senders don’t respect convention, don’t use context-appropriate content, etc. I consider my work email to be spam, basically.

There’s a principle in Civics that you should be careful passing ridiculous laws/policies because contempt for one law can quickly become contempt for Law in general.

Most companies have ridiculous email policies, and then managers wonder why their reports are missing their messages. Last week I found out someone important quit or was fired six weeks ago. I asked for someone to forward me the message, and it had the most innocuous title ever.

Around here if you need to talk to someone you take it to chat, which makes it very hard to record (previously outlook had such a small retention setting that you had to take it to chat it wiki anyway). Conversations happen in email, but they’re slow and often not fruitful.

I agree but also touch some grass.

This is more about situations where one person would benefit from the relationship and the other person couldn’t care less. You think Travis Kalanick cares if someone pitching him says “he’s not worth my time?” But that person benefits a lot from his response.