Emails don’t need to work like text messages. Why are reactions even a thing for them?
I like the idea - I don’t want to send you an email back, here’s a thumbs up to show I’ve received it.
I hate the execution because I get an email telling me you reacted to my email.
depends on the client; in outlook you just get an alert saying someone reacted.
Reactions like this work in closed ecosystems (Whatsapp / Facebook) where everyone is on the same client or via open standards that is baked into the spec of the protocol. E-Mail has neither of these, which is why it’s so egregious that a whole email is being sent with 4-16 bytes of actual content itself.
Internet Standards.
The things MS tried to extend-and-extinguish the Web when it was just barely born. Remember campaigns “best in any browser” ?
We almost didn’t have an open Internet.
Fuck you specifically, MicroSoft
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Fuck all Microsoft Products.
I’m not sure what you even want then. If an email can’t be delivered you should get a kickback notifications saying it can’t be delivered. Though, that may depend on the email service.
Ans if you’re effectively looking for a read-receipt, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want to be notified of it. I don’t want to have to manually check anything to see if there is new information to look at. An email may be overkill, but 🤷.
Not everyone wants read receipt notifications for everything. It is much easier if it is manual just like message reactions. So reaction is the best solution here. But as the user stated, its execution is not the best.
A simple indication on the email in the sidebar list would be fine. A whole ass new email is just a bit much.
our secretary uses a meme to end her daily attendance email, so I give her a laughing face when its a good one. She started it on an email I made a joke in. So I just recipicate it. I also like the thumbs up on emails that are FYI type things
What is a daily attendance email?
“Hi, Im in attendance today! 🍆”
we have staff that are all over the geographical area and to keep everyone up-to-the day on who is where (at specific locations, working from home, etc) they did this. Its also used for specific “hey everyone this is important today” kinda things
i like reactions, for the most part. its nice to do an acknowledgement without having to write out a whole reply so the other person knows i received it.
Back when I was a whee whippersnapper, we would click the reply button and type, “Ok”, or “thanks”, or “Ok, thanks”, or “gotcha”, or “:-)”, or “+1”, or “LOL”, or “LMFAO”, or … I mean, it was onerous, with those extra couple clickity clicks and tappity taps, but somehow we managed.
If you use the newer versions of Outlook it has some inane one-shot reply buttons you can click that is based on the content of the previous email and presumably some model built on you.
My work computer uses Outlook, and it usually has options like these
- Gotcha, thanks
- Brill, thank you
- I will do that, thanks
At my old workplace though, one of our customers would always respond with a couple of letters. Could be something like
Customer:
Hi. Could you update thing on website?Us:
Hello!
Absolutely. We’ve rolled out the update, and you should be able to see it now.
Hope all is well over there. :)Customer:
T MWhere T is short for “Thank you” and M is short for “Mary”
Ah. They were fantastic. Frustrating but awesome people.
Email requires no acknowledgement.
I also have a customer service requirement in my performance evaluation that says something about responding to emails within a fairly small amount of time. This reaction counts. So, yeah, everything that doesn’t require a real response gets a 👍 or a 🎉. I’m not missing an opportunity to get a raise or getting a quality improvement plan for something ridiculous like that.
same reason there is a poop emoji in a “professional” messaging app… MS is idiotic and out of ideas
MS with that “hello, fellow kids” energy.
100%
You can blame Unicode for that.
Before Unicode adopted it in 2010, Gmail had added it in 2008 to their email client: https://medium.com/hackernoon/10th-anniversary-of-the-poop-emoji-aab16fcb5b08
Outlook’s own reaction handling is terrible. It adds the reaction icon to the email, but it doesn’t mark it as unread or bring it to the top. The next day, I get an email with all the reactions for the day.
“Available for a meeting at 9 tomorrow?” 👍
Then the daily digest shows up at 9 and the meeting was never scheduled.
I’m confused as to why it wasn’t scheduled? Were you the one who was scheduling it, or were you reaction-replying to an invite, anticipating that the reaction emoji would accept the invitation and put the meeting on your calendar?
My work uses outlook and I still get a whole fuckin email saying “Dipshit has reacted 👍” and it’s extremely irritating. I’ll need to remember to turn off reactions on Monday.
I need a shirt that says “dipshit has reacted 👍”
I have a coworker that responds to everything with emojis. Teams messages. Emails. Everything. Even if it’s not relevant to him or directed at him. He always does it. I want to hit him with a chair.
I will say, it’s practical for everyone using the same system. Sometimes it’s nice to acknowledge an email without having to respond to it
And when I had my school account, they’d send out phishing alerts of what to look out for. Those emails would be spammed with crying laughing emojis
In the case of Outlook, read receipts are a thing if the sender wants at least an acknowledgement. True that the receiver can just click no on the option to send that receipt, but presumably they’re also the type that wouldn’t have sent a reaction to the email in the first place.
I disabled it as soon as they were launched. I also disabled the quick reply, reactions, and to text messages etc.
Hey let’s all change what we do and how we do it to accommodate the monopoly Microsoft. Again.
Don’t forget to add a string to your wifi ssid so Microsoft doesn’t index it.
And if you don’t want Google to index it you need to use a different string, and it must be placed at the end.
This how I learn that reactions to e-mail are a thing now? I’m not sure what to even think.
good thing i dont talk to anyone and i only get emails from companies, spam, and appointments. this would annoy the fuck outta me.
you got it!
I got a thumbs-up reply to an email once and immediately looked up how to block it.
👍
🎉
Seamonkey does this by default, took me ages to work out what the fuck this “J” people kept leaving on emails was
I don’t think it’s the same, the j thing is decades old, I assume it was a font / character encoding issue.
The reaction thing is relatively recent where you get a new email from their email system with a message “John Doe has reacted to your email with: 👍”
Specifically, “J” is a smiley face in Wingdings font.
Reactions are great. They allow for feedback without adding to the pile of email everyone already gets.
i agree reactions can be useful, but adding them to email the way Microsoft has is obnoxious for recipients using any client other than theirs. and, i think this is probably their intention: receiving an email reaction in a client that doesn’t render it as a reaction feels wrong and MS probably hopes this will encourage some people to switch to using Outlook.
the right way to add reactions to email would be to make it opt-in (and also not a vendor-specific header but instead something which aims to become a standard): clients should only allow reactions to messages which contain a header signaling that the sender supports receiving them.
In most office environments I’ve worked at there is no option for using another email client.
but email is used specifically for receipts, otherwise messaging would be used
I realize that this is up to the user and that choice is great, so the issue comes down to implementation. and as a user… I find out far after the fact that somebody reacted to my email because outlook doesn’t show me those notifications in a timely manner, nor am I going to look for them because I consider that a chat feature and Microsoft already sends me enough notification spam
“Thanks.”
One of my most hated email message bodies.
Ok but the point is, if anyone isn’t using Outlook they do get a pointless email. My workplace doesn’t use Outlook and I get tons of these. I’m glad to have learnt I can block them though.
The real stupid thing here is that a header has to be added to disable reactions. Why didn’t Microsoft just use a header to enable them? I mean make it opt in instead of opt out. Then they can use that header in all their Outlook shit and everyone else can go on with their day not worrying about it. So stupid, but not sure what I expected from Microsoft.
If you make a ‘feature’ opt-in, 3 people will use it, so the person who added it would have to work much harder to justify their paycheck. If you make everyone use your ‘feature’ by default, you can say ‘look how many people use the feature I added,’ while actually pointing at the number of people who didn’t turn off the feature according to the
spywaremetrics.
👍
Coming from a neurodivergent: fuck Microsoft for doing this. It does not go along well with how email should work, makes it confusing for several reasons and shits over a lot of expectations.
According to their history, this is the extend part.
Thankfully we’ve not yet upgraded from Outlook 2016… saving this for if we ever do.
Thankfully I haven’t seen this, but if I did, the feature I’d be inclined to use is called “block sender”.
😣
💯
