Do not apologize for replying late to my email

https://ploum.net/2026-02-11-do_not_apologize_for_replying_to_my_email.html

by validatori • 5 months ago

229 190 5 months ago

I do feel there's far too much of a focus on instantaneous response in today's world, both at work and in personal life. If something I can give you is truly preventing you from moving forward then that's fair enough, but otherwise send emails, don't rush the replies, and let people plan their own time.

ggm• 5 months ago

A buried appeal to avoid top posting.

Good, but like all good things, top posting is why we can't have good things.

It isn't going to stop.

ranaexmachina• 5 months ago

Bottom posting confuses the hell out of most people. I gave it a try but people kept complaining so I'm back to top posting even though it makes absolutely no sense.

easton• 5 months ago

Wonder if there's a way to make the popular email clients (outlook/gmail) re-sort conversation view so that the newest reply is at the bottom.

then enforce it by policy across the org, and watch the chaos as people read before speaking.

miroljub• 5 months ago

True. Once a coworker asked me why I was responding with an empty mail since my reply was at the bottom, and he didn't bother to scroll down. Since then, I gave up and just started using conventions everyone else is using. The goal is not purity, but clarity of communications.

I even started to avoid inline responses and comments, many find even that confusing.

Gracana• 5 months ago

Same. I tried really hard to quote properly, because I was so annoyed by the top-posting mess that everyone else did, and it frustrated me that people would add you to an email where you need to read 100 things that came before it (with increasingly garbled formatting) to understand what was going on.

I felt people were unwilling to take the responsibility for communicating properly, and so they took the easy route where they could shrug their shoulders and say "I included all the context."

I only ever got complaints from people who were confused by the quoting style or didn't know what the email was about. I'm not sure if it's still true, but at the time, Outlook didn't use threaded view mode by default and most people didn't know about it. FWIW I work in manufacturing and not in tech, I expect the level of competence in tech is a little higher, though I also hear how people moan about having to learn the tools they use every day, so maybe there's little difference.

1313ed012• 5 months ago

I bottom-post if the other person do so first. That almost never happens these days. I guess if too many do it like that then no one will be the first to bottom-post, even when both would prefer that. Not sure what a good solution would be that did not involve confusing random other people with bottom-posts.

I remember around the time top-posting had taken over, someone on a mailing list being upset about having their mail cut up and quoted inline by someone else. Can imagine today many might react like that if they ever encounter nicely formatted mail replies.

ninjin• 5 months ago

I think our contexts are all different. But, to share a different experience, as an academic (with plenty of conversations involving people in industry as well each year) I have used interleaved and bottom-posting for decades and it causes confusion maybe once a year at most and mostly because Microsoft's online client is broken and at times does not even render anything below "Dear Foo," in the HTML view (got to give this small start up in Redmond some more time though, we can not expect them to implement standards that have only been around for over 40 years).

Sharlin3• 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure that most people are only dimly aware of the existence of the quoted part at the bottom of an email. Mail clients routinely hide it by default, and in most cases it's never needed for anything in today's email conventions. Most clients now group conversations to threads, and most emails aren't long or complex enough to require much context anyway, never mind the custom of interleaving quotes and replies.

The vast majority people didn't yet use email back when bottom posting was good etiquette and top posting was discouraged. They're simply not aware of the concepts, or the controversy, at all. Even old-fashioned snail mail letters, for those who still remember such things, didn't usually include quoted passages, even though getting a reply to one's letter could easily take weeks if not months.

sixtyj• 5 months ago

E-mail was always asynchronous communication tool.

For people who like to see waving three dots in iPhone chat, e-mailing makes them anxious. So I understand that apology is quite normal.

It is a sort of generational difference, imho.

gchamonlive3• 5 months ago

Chats are ambiguous because it functions both as sync and async. I treat my whatsapp messages as async, but time and again I get heat from people because I take too long to reply, something I'll never feel the urge to apologize for.

coldpie2• 5 months ago

I see this in the opposite direction at work. I'll send someone a chat message after their working hours and they'll actually reply apologizing that can't look now and will reply tomorrow. Or that they're just waking up and they'll look later today. Yeah, that's what I expect, I'm not your boss asking you to come in on a Saturday. Why on earth are you looking at your work chat outside of your work hours anyway??

vel0city3• 5 months ago

Reply time to instant messages is extremely context sensitive. If I'm having a chat catching up with an old friend I haven't talked with much in a while, I might take several hours to a day or two to write the next message. If I take a day or two to reply to my spouse's inquiry of "what is the plan for dinner tonight?" or "you need to pick up the kids from school today, ok?" I'll have some problems!

squeefers4• 5 months ago

written letters are asynchronous but people expected timely (relative to snail mail) replies even back then.

nmcfarl• 5 months ago

I am pretty sure this is not true.

I recall my mother’s family conversing via mail in the early 80’s - and she would write one 10 page letter a month as a reply (max) - that would 3 or 4 mails a year with any particular sibling (and probably 1 phone call - but phone calls to alaska were expensive, and you wouldn’t say all you wanted to).

randusername• 5 months ago

generational difference

I feel squeezed in the middle between antsy-verbose zoomer emailers and terse boomer emailers that hit me with ambiguous 5 word replies or those godforsaken emojii email reacts.

My decree is that 95% of emails should be three sentences double-spaced. 5% should be paragraphs. Hypertext is permissible almost entirely because of quote formatting, which should be used liberally so that each email is as self-contained as possible.

1313ed012• 5 months ago

You do not need hypertext to prefix lines with "> ".

Sharlin3• 5 months ago

Verbose zoomers and super-terse boomers? I'd expect the opposite, if anything.

washadjeffmad• 5 months ago

I took a day off texting to sleep and recover from an injury, and the woman I was seeing (in her 30s) threatened to delete our chat because she assume I was mad and ignoring her.

She's part of a certain digital generation, and expectations change.

A younger PM I'm working with right now emailed me twice in a few hours because I didn't immediately sign into their management platform after our 4pm meeting. Granted, that's her job, but the project doesn't officially start for a few more months.

em-bee4• 5 months ago

i'd try to find out what is behind the reaction of the woman you are seeing. threatening to break up is in itself unhealthy for any relationship. if my partner thinks it is ok to make such threats then i'd end the relationship right there. if we are married then the next step is marriage counceling.

throwway1203852• 5 months ago

If I did that to my wife without telling her she would probably assume I was avoiding her for some reason. But that's more a factor of how often we normally communicate, and if I depart from that she infers that there's something wrong.

Juliate3• 5 months ago

Everything is asynchronous but face-to-face, phone and video call.

I cut every communication tool settings that enable online status or "typing..." information. It sets unreasonable expectations no one should have (but in contextual requests on the spot).

debo_2• 5 months ago

Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable.
It also puts a lot of pressure on me: what if I take more time than you to reply? Isn’t the whole point of asynchronous communication to be… asynchronous? Each on its own rhythm?

This one of those sentiments that makes me scratch my head. If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?

464931682• 5 months ago

Some of us survive because we have anxiety deeply rooted in a fear of failure. It causes us to be perfectionists. This can look like success for those who hide it well.

debo_2• 5 months ago

I have been hospitalized and almost died multiple times from stress-related disorders, so I get it. But as soon as I catch myself putting aspects of my health on the behaviour of other people -- especially for something this small -- it's time for me to start looking inwards.

some_furry2• 5 months ago

If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?

Not the author, but I'd wager it's an evolving story over many years. At first, you ignore it entirely. It might not even register at first, or if it does, it's just a barely conscious "huh, this interaction makes me feel weird" sort of deal. And you leave it be. But then death by a thousand cuts later, you're irritated by this habit and want to speak out against it. And so, you write a blog post about why it's bad or annoying or whatever. And then you go back to surviving another day.

jbstack7• 5 months ago

For me the point is that if you feel uncomfortable over something that is widespread and considered normal social etiquette, it's on you to deal with feeling uncomfortable, and you can't really expect everyone else to change their behaviour just for you.

squeefers4• 5 months ago

does this same guy ruminate when somebody holds a door open for him, or when hes asked how hes doing?

107292872• 5 months ago

In my opinion, the example of the door is not very relevant, because it often forces the person behind to run to catch up with the door so that the person in front does not wait too long. For my part, I hold the door as long as possible while walking without turning around, so it is up to the person behind to decide whether or not to run, without putting too much pressure on them.

A_D_E_P_T• 5 months ago

In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours. If I get blown off, or if somebody takes 4 days to respond to my email, my impression is always that my counterparty views the matter as unimportant. For my part, if I reply late, and if the matter is genuinely important, I think it's proper and fitting to include a brief note of apology.

In email communications with friends, it varies. I'll often let conversations hang for a while until there's something new to discuss.

squeefers4• 5 months ago

i would suspect this flies over the OPs head.

reconnecting2• 5 months ago

Absolutely! The author doesn't mention what type of communication he means, but for business communications (in Belgium, where the author is from), anything over 24 hours (one working day) must have some explanation.

It's always better to explain yourself, otherwise, it looks unprofessional if you reply after a week as though it's normal.

Overall, the recommendations about email look very personal to the author and perhaps shouldn't be taken as general advice.

itopaloglu83• 5 months ago

Maybe on defined routine processes, but otherwise your email has a lower priority, unless it’s an urgent matter.

Gud4• 5 months ago

Not everyone is glued to their computer.

I don’t owe an explanation to anyone.

prmoustache7• 5 months ago

In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours.

Sounds funny because I only read mails when someone tell me about them on MSTeams.

Between IM, supports tickets and jira stories I don't really see the point of emails anymore. If it is something that has an SLA tickets seem to be the way to go, if not Teams. If it is an urgent matter, mentioning my name or calling me will be a quicker way to go. Email seem to be in that weird place where some people still seem to want to insert invisible business matters in an ocean of junk and automatized mails/notifications you generally never subscribe yourself but ends up subscribed by default when given access to resources/applications.

wlesieutre2• 5 months ago

Teams may work for your internal messages but if you deal with anyone outside of your own employer email is still the standard for communication. Not every piece of business that gets done fits into a ticket system.

j455• 5 months ago

Just because one doesn’t see the point doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.

Each communication tool has its strengths, namely managing interruptions.

People using one’s attention as their inbox directly with DM vs a when you can get to it email can be easily mismanaged.

It’s different for each job.

jbstack7• 5 months ago

(1) I don't have Jira, (2) I don't want to fill out a SLA ticket, (3) I don't use Teams, (4) I don't know your phone number and/or prefer to deal with things in writing.

Email works because: (a) it is ubiquitous, (b) you don't have to pay for some proprietary software to use it, (c) you remain in control of your data (no IM messages suddenly disappearing), (d) you have a permanent, local, copy of what was said in writing, (e) it's often the standard court-recognised form of communication, other than post, for things that matter legally (e.g. sending notices).

That's not to say that email isn't without many defects. But it's still the best we have for many work-related use cases.

alistairSH2• 5 months ago

Primarily, email gets used for customer-facing comms (they aren't in Jira). It also gets used for lots of system notifications that could probably be moved to Slack, but inertia is a bitch and they remain in email.

j455• 5 months ago

It can be common courtesy as long as the other party is not feeling entitled to one's time and attention.

otikik2• 5 months ago

Different people and different work environments have different rules.'

I view my email once per week. If you need an immediate answer from me, I expect you to send me a slack/chat/pagerduty warning, even one that says "I sent you an email, I need answer by tomorrow".

lukan• 5 months ago

If you communicate your expectation visibly, then this works. Otherwise not so much.

arccy• 5 months ago

24 hours -> 1 business day

don't expect replies over weekends and holidays

coldtea• 5 months ago

If I get blown off, or if somebody takes 4 days to respond to my email, my impression is always that my counterparty views the matter as unimportant

Usually it is unimportant, and the other side is just wasting their time.

jltsiren• 5 months ago

It's more like two business days in the academia, and only if a simple response is enough. Complex questions often take longer, because coming up with an answer may take an hour or two of uninterrupted time.

And if it's a cold email requesting something beyond a reply, and you don't have an existing business relationship with the sender, there is no expectation that you respond. An endless stream of requests from less reputable entities is an unavoidable fact of academic life. Such requests often go directly to the spam folder, as people have collectively decided that they are spam and trained the spam filters accordingly. Even if you think your request is legitimate, it can be indistinguishable from spam.

OJFord• 5 months ago

Hear such mixed things on that though, often it's oh academics love to hear someone wants to read their paper, just email them, they'll be only too happy to provide you with a pdf.

So I tried it once; no reply. (A month or two after it was published too, not something that might've been difficult to dig up.) Probably straight to spam.

tshaddox2• 5 months ago

In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours.

Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail. [0]

Of course I recognize that email is often used for time-sensitive matters (like scheduling events), but any time I see an email that is likely to require multiple timely backs-and-forths I'll try to move the conversation to a more suitable medium.

[0] Here I'm referring to solicited emails sent by humans or transactional emails triggered directly by a human interaction. In practice our email inboxes also serve as a general "notifications hub" for all sorts of things including recurring events ("remember to pay your bill") and, of course, unsolicited junk.

carlosjobim7• 5 months ago

There are only two suitable mediums: E-Mail or phone call.

RupertSalt5• 5 months ago

Have you routinely received letters or bills from bureaucrats?

I can tell you that those banks, government agencies, and hospitals know how to backdate letters, postmark them like clockwork, and land in my mailbox on a Friday at close of business on a 3-day weekend, just to jam us up and narrow any deadline that may exist.

Even a hand-delivered notice from the landlady shows up at 6:01pm when the office is already closed. I guarantee that you will be helpless to respond in a timely fashion.

It has been suggested that "bankers hours" and 9-5 office hours were originated specifically to jam up the working man, who needed to be in the mines or on the factory floor during those hours. If a bank actually wanted to serve working people, they would be open on weekends. Traditionally it was not something your wife or kids could proxy, if they did not drive or have authorization, but the single working man was doubly screwed in these situations.

This year I also have the experience of very premature "billing notices" sent to my email and text and every other place, where the bureaucrats are counting on impatience to pay a bill far too early, before it is due, luring you in with ambiguous wording. People today are warning "do not comply in advance" and I am observing this maxim with health care billing in particular.

alsetmusic3• 5 months ago

Different stroke for different folks, but I'm still very much in the paradigm where email is more like a letter in the mail, not like a text message, IM, or "please return my call" voicemail.

I moved from a company that operated under that paradigm (Slack was the primary mode of internal comms) to one that treats email as the primary mode of comms. It was a minor challenge to start watching my inbox and keep it at zero-unread (something I don't care about at all in my personal emails). Feels natural to me now when I'm in work-mode.

baubino• 5 months ago

My rule is: 2 business days if I know you, 2-4 business days if I don’t know you but you are offering something of actual value to me, up to infinity for everyone else. I only offer an apology for the first group.

the_arun• 5 months ago

Also Async doesn’t mean delayed forever.

charles_f• 5 months ago

It's like everything else, it depends

If I ask a quote, get it, and answer only 2w later, I will probably apologize. If someone sends me a quote unprovoked, they shouldn't have any expectations of getting an answer, and if I answer even late, I won't apologize.

If my boss or people working on my project send me an email to get a status on something and it takes me a week to answer, I'll apologize- even if that's because I was busy on something more important. If a random colleague asks me for something unrelated with my direct responsibilities, similarly I'll get to it if I get to it when I get to it, and I dont think they should have expectations of receiving an answer, so I won't apologize

MrDarcy• 5 months ago

This was previously true but no longer. Anyone who sends an email instead of a DM for something requiring a 24 hour turn around bears the responsibility for any resulting delay in 2026.

Gud4• 5 months ago

I am a site test engineer. I am also the primary contact for site test related questions internally for our factory and from customer and colleagues.

If your question needs a answer within 24 hours , give me a call and I will do my best to answer. If you send me an email, without any clear urgency, I will respond when I have time. Typically within a week.

bix62• 5 months ago

24 hours is ridiculous. I spent over 3 hours replying to emails yesterday and didn’t get through them all. And now I’m even more backed up on projects.

antasvara• 5 months ago

I think this really depends on your role. I don't get enough emails in a day to require 3 hours of replies.

More generally, though, the response can be as simple as "We have received this email; the request will take some time, here's roughly when you can expect an update."

swat535• 5 months ago

Everyone thinks that their inquiries are urgent, top priority. That's not always the case, it maybe urgent to you, but not to the other person.

If something is critical, you can communicate via other means: phone calls, SMS, slack, etc.. and even then, there's no guarantee you will get a response.

In business context, I lean the other way, tend to give all parties as much leg room as possible.

I think The Eisenhower Method is a great fit for prioritization.

dwedge• 5 months ago

Airbnb recently sent me a terms change email that doesnt apply for six months and I dont use it anyway, but email headers set it to urgent and important.

projektfu3• 5 months ago

This must be why so many spammers now have automation set up to send me the first spam, then a second a day later asking if I got the first one, then a third to ask if I am still interested or willing to let their exciting opportunity to pass by. And then restarting the pattern in a month or so.

jdboyd• 5 months ago

I think that for many cases that should be modified from 24 hours to by the end of the next business day. I feel no obligation to reply on a Sunday to someone who emails me on Saturday or late Friday. They can wait until Monday.

graemep• 5 months ago

You are conflating important with urgent. Something might be very important, but not urgent.

I might be slower to reply to something important because I need the time to get the reply right.

jeffrallen• 5 months ago

Yeah, dude, but sometimes I do consider the matter unimportant, and it's a useful signal to send to the other person.

Your important might not be mine, and that's perfectly fine. Professionals negotiate that difference, instead of unilaterally deciding the other is blowing them off.

tobr• 5 months ago

This would be an absolutely savage way to follow up on an email you never received a reply to three years ago.

ziml772• 5 months ago

Most people do expect timely replies to emails. If you act like taking days to respond to an email is normal, people will get very upset with you.

falcor843• 5 months ago

I won't. Days is ok. For non-urgent emails, I would only be slightly annoyed if it's been more than a week, and I'll then send a reminder.

It's ok. I know you're busy, take your time and respond at your convenience.

Sharlin3• 5 months ago

In most contexts days is perfectly normal, and expecting a faster reply, especially without explaining why it's urgent, is considered impolite. This includes all the cases where the job of the recipient is not literally "reply to e-mails ASAP".

nicbou4• 5 months ago

Then be upset. Nowhere did I agree to reply to emails quickly, if at all. Your expectations, your feelings, your problem.

ziml772• 5 months ago

Maybe your context is different, but all I can say is that I used to consider email to be something that you respond to when you get to it. Yet after enough complaints were raised against me I had to change that behavior and reply immediately even if it was just to say "I will look into this".

I am not personally upset if people don't get to my emails right away, because if I have anything actually urgent I'll get a Teams message out to the person who I know can handle it. (That does change a bit if the communication to to an external vendor in which case it's going to their support team who I do expect to respond promptly).

brushfoot• 5 months ago

What an unpleasant attitude. People have emotions. If they're apologizing, maybe they feel bad. Accept it and get on with your day. A punctilious email etiquette isn't going to improve anything.

falcor843• 5 months ago

I actually really liked the post. I'm often prone to apologizing, thinking that it's a social expectation, and the post made me smile and relax a bit, thinking to myself "oh, maybe it's not that important, and it'll be ok if I don't".

j455• 5 months ago

Responding too quickly to emails is the same as responding too quickly to IMs, it will often invite more responding.

bell-cot• 5 months ago

That depends on context, and how you phrase the reply.

jjice• 5 months ago

I don't know, it seems pretty light-hearted. If they sent this directly to someone in response to an email, then I may agree, but since it's more of just an opinion blog piece, I find this to be a good outlet for thoughts to share without really impacting anyone.

107292872• 5 months ago

Well, to be honest, for a lot of people, apologizing for late answer is more a social convention or a reflex than real apologies.

The same for : "How are you ?", "I hope this email finds you well" or worse than everything, Emails Greetings embedded into the signature.

SoftTalker3• 5 months ago

And please remove the multi-paragraph legal disclaimers from your .sig. They are meaningless and annoying.

bluebarbet2• 5 months ago

The author does not seem to be advocating in favor of punctilious etiquette so much as simply getting the point.

projektfu3• 5 months ago

I agree that the apologies tend to make one a little uncomfortable. This is because people do not simply say, "I am sorry I did not have time to write sooner. Here is my response", but instead say, "I would have written but my child was sick, etc.," so you feel the need to respond to that, and feel bad for having bothered them.

Almost nobody writes, "I am sorry I was scrolling Twitter and Hacker News while ignoring my e-mail. Fortunately, I have stopped and now can respond!"

alsetmusic3• 5 months ago

I write no more than either, "Apologies for the delayed response," or "Apologies for the delayed response, I've been out of the office unexpectedly." Very business-like. Tone neutral. Easy to digest and move on.

prmoustache7• 5 months ago

I think there is a cultural gap. He mention not only apologizing but giving explanations.

For instance my observation is that people in the USA will tend to give you a lot of unrequested information like all their health/medical problems or the sports games of their kid and what not. People in europe seems to be more private unless they are talking with very close coworker they would consider as friends.

abcde666777• 5 months ago

Apologies for this comment!

mda• 5 months ago

Such a weird thing to say, if this makes you uncomfortable, imagine how uncomfortable it makes the other side reading this.

It is common courtesy, not a big deal.

falcor843• 5 months ago

Common courtesies often have a ratchet effect, only increasing in expectations over time, and we need a correction every once in a while to avoid sinking into the expectation abyss.

pixelmonkey• 5 months ago

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”

-Donald Knuth

j455• 5 months ago

In that case, emails like IM's can be batched together during a 30 minute block twice a day.

shepherdjerred• 5 months ago

That’s what he does except it’s every 6 mo

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

atmosx• 5 months ago

At that time made sense. It’s clear what he is trying to say: “I won’t engage every excited programmer who wants to know this or that via email, like others tend to do even for little things”.

In 2026 email is the most time-respecting communication medium other than a classic, physical letter.

mghackerlady• 5 months ago

Knuth is such a wonderful guy, his books are amazing

nicbou4• 5 months ago

What a clever sentence!

cbondurant• 5 months ago

I feel like the lag-time of communication was an important component of older forms of communication that has been lost. That's not to say that fast communication isn't a boon to society, of course. Only that slower communication gives you more flexibility in how you respond, and more time to think about what your response should be.

When the main form of long distance communication was the postal system, and letters took days to travel from sender to receiver, you could easily wait days, if not weeks, to draft up your reply and mail it out. The recipient on the other end wouldn't even be able to discern the difference between your delay and the delay from the postal network itself. It had some in-built slack.

When the only phones were landlines, if someone called you and you knew you were in a bad mood, the kind of bad mood that would invariably make you say something stupid, you could just not pick up! There were plenty of common, understandable reasons someone wouldn't be available to answer their landline. Then they could leave you a message, and you could call back when you mood improved again. Again, there was slack built into the system.

Now there's this cultural expectation that puts far more attention on your reaction speed. A text message with no immediate response could just be them not seeing it immediately... But actually no! Now we have read receipts too! You can't even pretend to have not seen it yet while you think of your reply. Some platforms even have the little "currently typing" indicator tell them how long you've spent drafting and re-drafting whatever message you ended up sending. A panopticon of communication. Now there's no slack. Any person anywhere in the world could try and get a hold of you with the same expectation of immediacy that a face-to-face conversation would supply.

Now of course, not every single person I might text, call, or send an email to, will have the same expectations for what is an appropriate degree of responsiveness. But, (speaking from my personal experience) I am absolutely miserable at reading that from social clues. I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations, and that allowing myself to be lax may very well give them a terrible opinion of me. (Though, the degree to which their opinion of me actually matters is a different question entirely!)

quesera2• 5 months ago

I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations

This is self-defeating. You have the option (and I recommend it) to intentionally adopt the opposite assumption:

Zero communication is urgent, unless explicitly described as such.

It might be appropriate to make exceptions for certain people. Parents, partners, children. Maybe some work people during a crunch. Maybe some friends going through difficult times.

dleeftink• 5 months ago

And still, we apologised ('I hope this find you well' and so on). It's cruft, it's slack, and it's social. We need some anchors to hang our message on. We know when it's necessary and when it isn't, and by breaking conventions we relay intent ('sorry not sorry').

qwertytyyuu• 5 months ago

Reminding you of context is just weird, just scroll down an read you previous email

j455• 5 months ago

Reminding of context can be useful to summarize your understanding and what you are responding to.

Kind of like LLMs.

RupertSalt5• 5 months ago

This may be more of a "me problem" than a "them problem".

I often have the experience that people apologize for being slow to respond to me. Whether they're on the phone, at a counter in person, or whatever. Sometimes they say "oh dear, this computer is so slow today!" or "please bear with me while I check this..." but many times it is a very pointed and pre-emptive statement that they cannot respond or comply with my request immediately, that it may take X number of hours or days or something.

I made a special request to a vendor last year, and the CSR said "oh gosh, we need to reach out to the manufacturer, in Europe, and you know how supply chains are these days... and..." and I literally said "no problem" and eventually, they did not even charge me for the item when it came in, months later. Likewise the dry cleaner always seems to protest that they cannot finish in time and can we please push back the deadline, but I feel like they are trying to shirk my business because they're overwhelmed, too.

And I've come to believe that this is mostly the result of me approaching with impatience and anxiety. I often reach a desk while breathless and make my requests more like demands with the utmost of urgency. I am not, in fact, that impatient, but I give that impression and people believe that I would be disappointed if they take too long. But I do tend to interrupt and distract people if they are trying to collect their thoughts, or figure something out.

My last supervisor used to do this all the time. Practically every email and every voicemail was followed up with apology for being slow. And I really think that he was very gently telling me not to be so impatient and anxious.

But also, there really is a business standard for prompt replies. If someone goes out-of-office, they are usually expected to put up an "OOO autoreply" that will tell you when they're returning. Because it really is business etiquette to respond promptly, or reset expectations by explain why you'll be late.

jcmfernandes• 5 months ago

I'll continue apologizing. I'm very sorry, though.

networked• 5 months ago

"Sorry, not sorry I'm sorry."

walthamstow• 5 months ago

I don't know where the author is from but this goes dead against common courtesy in the UK for sure, and probably similar places like Canada and Japan as well. In Japan you might expect the apology to be longer than the email content.

iugtmkbdfil834• 5 months ago

Thank you. I logged in to say almost exactly that. I was raised with very different cultural norms that are hard to remove. At times, I do come across as overly apologetic based on nothing more than, from my upbringing perspective, being polite.

alistairSH2• 5 months ago

No idea if I'm normal or not (based in the US, with a British family), but if I miss an email by a few days/weeks, I'll just say "sorry for the delay" and jump right into the actual content. And on the recipient side, I don't expect even that. If it was critical, I would have used Slack (or sent a follow-up email if it was something to an external party).

projektfu3• 5 months ago

GOD: Oh, don't grovel. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's people grovelling.

ARTHUR: Sorry.

GOD: And don't apologize. Every time I talk to someone it's sorry this, and, forgive me that, and, I'm not worthy.

d--b• 5 months ago

People who get so annoyed by other people’s habits should really work on themselves rather than writing long blog posts about why others should bend to their own world view.

Or at least make it funny.

tmtvl• 5 months ago

Is it worse to apologize to one who doesn't want you to do so, or to not apologize to one who _does_ want you to?

bluebarbet2• 5 months ago

Pascal's email wager.

reconnecting2• 5 months ago

The author is Belgian. But the post is not about how to handle business emails in Belgium, or in general, it's about the author's own preferences in written communication.

I don't understand why everyone below is discussing how a person treats his own personal emails.

NicuCalcea• 5 months ago

You can't really put a strong opinion on the internet, have someone share it on a forum, and expect people not to discuss it.

tsimionescu5• 5 months ago

I can't for the life of me understand why people think it's OK to send and even expect plaintext email in 2026. There's so much content that requires formatting and non-Unicode support in order to make sense. Formatted text, lists, in-line graphs or images, tables, equations or other mathematical formulae, all of these benefit from a controlled layout that plaintext just doesn't offer or can barely approximate. Why would you limit your email communication like this?

carlosjobim7• 5 months ago

If your e-mail is only text, then it should be plaintext. The receiver knows better than you what kind of formatting she would like to read it in.

tsimionescu5• 5 months ago

The definition of "text" itself is quite vague. Is a code sample text? What about a series of code samples intercalated with common language descriptions? What about a numbered list? What about a poem?

Also, just because I send some text as HTML doesn't prevent in any way the receiver from formatting that however they want. I'm just adding some display hints, that their email client may or may not ignore.

frou_dh• 5 months ago

On the off-chance I ever do reply to some of the months/years old things that I've never replied to, then I will surely include an apology, because it's definitely rude what I've done.

I don't think many people in the real world worship the sanctity of the "Asynchronous Communication" principle above all else. Maybe the author is the 1/1000 that does.

kqr• 5 months ago

I get a couple of cold emails a week and I like to be as helpful as I can when people have entrusted me with their opinions/thoughts/concerns/questions. I also often don't find the time to respond until weeks or months later, at which point an apology seems reasonable.

I do like the idea of asking the sender to reply a few weeks/months later.

grvdrm• 5 months ago

My simple route for handling slow replies:

1. Quick email saying “acknowledge, will work on a reply with estimate target date”

2. Proper reply ideally by target.

Guilty as charged.

tristor• 5 months ago

As someone who is often late replying to emails and feels compelled to put in an apology, it's because my experience is that most of the folks emailing me (that aren't cold emails, e.g. things related to actual work/activities) are generally expecting a reply within one or two business days, so when it takes me a month to get back to them a brief apology is in order. The apology isn't because I feel I've done something wrong, per se, it's because I know that my timeliness didn't meet their expectations and they may have had to move forward without my input. Sometimes that's fine, sometimes I'm an SME that they need input from and they may have been waiting and my lack of reply was a blocking action.

The quantity of apologies I write in email replies is directly correlated to how overworked I am from existing in a reality where the existence of unproven tooling causes more work to be put on my plate without any realistic avenues to manage it. When everything is urgent, it can be impolite to be explicit about your priorities, but waiting to reply implicitly makes the point that something else was more important, and that is something which has political consequences, especially in business. Ultimately, like any element of etiquette, it's about smoothing over the rough edges so we can all get along and to assuage any feelings that the other person may have that they got stiffed.

I wish things worked the way the author thinks things work, and maybe it does in the world of academia or wherever this person is insulated from the consequences of late-stage capitalism and the gnat-like attention span that social media has inculcated into the global population. But in the business world, especially in the US, and especially in 2025 onward, there is an expectation that every individual person can do the job of a team of 6, and that responses need to be done with urgency to every missive. That's clearly an unrealistic and unfair expectation, but because all of us want to avoid being starving and homeless, we do our best to meet that expectation anyway, hence why burnout is epidemic and we all hate the current timeline.

Juliate3• 5 months ago

Lots of opinions either way. What's peculiar is the disconnect in some arguments here.

If you are serious and down to business, taking into consideration the cultural bit over the efficiency or value of the relationship is backwards; apart from taking hints about manners and future expectations of communication with your correspondent.

phendrenad2• 5 months ago

Apologizing for replying late to an email is common practice between colleagues in business, especially if your late reply has blocked that person from doing their job. I don't know who this Ploum guy is, or why he has a nickname, or why French Wikipedia seems to think he's a noteworthy software developer, but I hope for France's sake he isn't actually as influential as he thinks, because this could be disastrous for French-English business communication.

omgJustTest• 5 months ago

Thank you!

nicbou4• 5 months ago

I don't think that people are entitled to a quick reply, or any reply at all. Sure, a quick reply is courteous, but not at all an obligation.

heyitsdaad• 5 months ago

You are talking to a human and they have feelings.

They feel guilty for not answering sooner and they are letting that known. It makes life beautiful.

SoftTalker3• 5 months ago

Old fashioned email etiquette and "netiquette" favored brevity and omission of pleasantries (and trimming quoted messages, etc.) because people were reading on 300 baud dial-up and it made the difference between taking 5 seconds to load your message or maybe a minute or more.

It's largely irrelevant for any technical reason today, but the old greybeards still cling to it (I'm one of them).

themafia• 5 months ago

Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable.

Get over it. No one is doing it for your benefit. They're providing a secondary signal about their own workload. Just ignore it if you cannot make use of it.

skobes• 5 months ago

I mean, it's also an attentional commitment for me to remember your idiosyncratic apology-preferences. So I might continue apologizing for replying late to your email, unless you convince me that _everyone_ doesn't like this...

Peacefulz• 5 months ago

I wish I could convince my friends online to fall back on email. So many times the "watering holes" have changed, and I've lost some valuable contacts in the shuffle.

arkmm• 5 months ago

Sorry Ploum, just getting a chance to read this now and comment. Great insights!

pickleRick243• 5 months ago

Who keeps linking this guy's posts? I don't think I've agreed with a single one of his takes.

kgwxd• 5 months ago

I stopped saying stuff like this out loud because it usually turns into "I know you don't like when... but, [does thing anyway]" and now it's 10 times more annoying.

Do not apologize for replying late to my email

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