An Interruption for an Email Pet Peeve

Steven Horwitz

Want to really piss me off?  Want to really piss off a college administrator?  Here's what you do:

You get an email from them with a question in it where the email includes several cc's.  Then when you reply with the answer, DON'T hit "reply to all," just hit "reply."  You're smarter than the sender.  You know he or she really didn't want the cc's to know the answer to the damn question and just included the cc's for fun.  Better to waste the sender's time by making him/her put the cc's back into the "thank you" reply or forward the reply separately.  That's a very efficient use of the time of very busy people.

Seriously, when you get an email with a question and it has cc's in it, just hit reply to all. Please, it's all I ask as a former administrator who lists this has his number one email pet peeve.

Rant over, return to your regularly scheduled discussions of Austrian economics.

(And don't even bother noting how much time I wasted composing this email compared to the time it took me to add the cc's to the email in question...)

Comments

[Roger Koppl]

I dunno, Steve. If you send to my university address, it forwards automatically to my private email. But other addressees drop out and it takes quite a bit of work for me to uncover who else got the email. Then I have to cut and paste. Blech. Could be the same thing for person you're fuming over.

[Steve Horwitz]

That was not the case here Roger.

Plus, this is a reason NOT to forward professional mail to a private address, especially Gmail, where it is, apparently, harder, for some reason, to use reply to all. That's my son's excuse anyway.

I have another pet peeve about why people should actually using their university email addresses for university business, but I'm not in the mood to rant about that one now. :)

[Steve Miller]

You administrators always err on the side of cc'ing everyone, and that's why you end up in kill files.
;-), sort of.

[Adam]

Horwitz for Email Czar!

[twitter.com/aniceberg]

I sense a business opportunity here... an email protocol that allows the sender to specify to whom any replies get copied to; probably easier if it happens from the sender's side to auto-forward any reply to the other CC'd addresses if the replyee didn't have the etiquette to do so themselves.

[Mario Rizzo]

I, for one, want to raise the costs of administrators asking questions. This is one good way to do so.

[Greego]

"an email protocol that allows the sender to specify to whom any replies get copied to;"

You wouldn't need a change in protocol to achieve this, just a change to the client functionality on the sender side to allow for an optional, one-off mail rule when you use CC.

[Greego]

Steve, reply-to-all is often considered rude and a lot of people will be hesitant to use it; especially if the CCs are not known to the recipient. The original sender (you) should specifically request it.

[Steve Horwitz]

I can understand reply-to-all being rude when there's a large number of cc's, but when it's, say, no more than 3? What I continue to not understand is why the recipient thinks I included the cc's if NOT so that they are part of the conversation/answer to the question. It simply seems obvious to me that the reason you cc someone on an email with a question is because they too need to know the answer.

@Mario: and you wonder why you don't get any raises or end up teaching in that nasty classroom in the basement... ;)

[Rob]

I seriously just wanted to say, epic post. Went through a lot of that crap myself so I know where you're coming from.

[petsafe stubborn]

Indeed am epic pot, I totally agree Rob!