In an outlook only company, reactions make a ton of sense. They save tons of "great, thank you " emails.
Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you're genuinely thankful!
Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you're genuinely thankful!
Party: pooped.
Is this just the sender looking for visibility? Does the recipient appreciate that yet another middle manager CC'd the whole company on a single sentence congratulatory message? Is there some other social function at work here that I don't understand?
Sometimes I think it would be funny if all the individual contributors coordinated to ALSO reply-all with "Congratulations", but it would become clear pretty quickly that something was up, and it's a mean thing to do to whomever is being congratulated.
Put differently, it's a kind of "parliamentary procedure": specific rules and expectations that everyone follows in the workplace to keep things "professional" and streamlined, in terms of interpersonal interactions. You may not actually give a damn about whatever the achievement is of Mx Boss, but you sending a congrats or party-popper emoji is sufficient to acknowledge that Mx Boss has done A Thing that Mx Boss thinks is significant.
You may not care at all, but saying that to Mx Boss would have consequences, even if it is the truth that everyone knows.
In the context of meetings-that-don't-have-to-be-meetings, it's (cynnically) a kind of show of fealty. I'm talking here about all-hands or whole department meetings, where every talking point is scripted ahead of time and you could pretty much just send the written up notes of what everyone is going to say already as an email and it'd save however many person-hours of work are wasted in just attending the meeting. For a while I was baffled about why our exec suite was okay with losing so much time across the org, then I realized in part it's an assurance of power: they declare a meeting, everyone shows up, and everyone is content within that social contract of how this stuff works. The point of the meeting isn't to convey information efficiently, it's to ensure that the power structure of the organization is functioning as expected.
But I wish the feature that you can write say @joel to get someone’s attention in large email threads with too many on CC would have been adopted by more mail clients.
I have never seen one myself.
Surely there’s an RFC for that right?
The ostensible "problem" with this would probably be "email is too slow for real-time chat!" But really, how much difference does a few seconds make? And modern connections/tech make me think that idea might have to be reevaluated anyways.
It wouldn't be a business but I could see such an app becoming quite popular.
I'm happy to report that this already exists: https://delta.chat/
Indeed, there is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9078
It's used by Delta Chat (IM over email).
They should use Teams then, MS is in the process implementing untold horror into that one (my unfortunate friend works there) where they could live out nighmarish feature dreams and leave the email for actual content. Or keep all emails inside the company - send out the pigeons! - for f's sake then if they insist emoji based infantile communication.