Friday's Unscientific Poll: Read receipts

[nanila]

Poll #23032 Read receipts

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 48

When I receive a request for a read receipt on an email message, I

Ignore it
40 (83.3%)

Send it
8 (16.7%)

Well. Not so much opinions as An Opinion, which is that I loathe them. I have never ever sent one. To me an email message is like a paper letter in this way. Once I have sent it, it's up to the recipient when and if they read it and choose to respond.

Comments

[liseuse]

I ignore them 99% of the time. If they are coming from someone sending an email on behalf of One Of Our Big Important People and I don't have time to respond to the email immediately I might send one, but usually I try to set some time aside to just respond to the email - even if the response is "I don't know/I don't have this but I'm working on it" because I don't want their lives to be harder than they have to be.

Read receipts just don't work with how I approach my work email. Sure, I read that email at 8:25am but that's because I was doing email triage. I'm not going to reply to it until I've had more coffee and worked out what to respond with/if it's even my job to respond to it.

[word_geek]

Exactly this. And I have one person I work with who appears to have set her email to always send a read receipt (though, thinking about it, maybe she has now switched that off). But it meant she got multiple emails from me, probably. One when I triaged it, and then tagged it unread and filed it in Actions, another when I actually replied to it. And if I picked up from the mailbox, she might have had a third when the triage person for the shared box told her we'd get to her edit in $time. So three emails telling her someone read it, two of them alongside Actual Responses.

H

[liseuse]

Thankfully very few people in my workplace bother with them, which is partly because our IT people asked people to not use them as a blanket technique because they were snarling up the helpdesk ticket system (auto-replies also do this, sighhh). But some external people do and look, the quote I requested is probably important to me, but I'm still not sending you a read receipt to prove that I opened/read it.