I have started noticing this recently. Not sure if it is a trend.
You send someone, say a customer or a client, or maybe even a friend an eMail. In it you ask a few questions of them. Not solving-world-poverty-questions, just some basic straight-forward questions, that could be helpful to you.
The response you get back is:
“Great. Thanks.”
Do people even read their emails anymore?
Sounds good, thanks.
~Matt
I think we read them, but our use/dependence on our “crackberries/iphones” as well as the common practice of texting has created this abbreviated and limited information practice of communicating. I agree wholeheartedly with your frustration. Why is it with all this technology to make life and “staying in touch easier” - the quality of touch has depreciated dramatically. Rant over and out.
I only read the ones about the package waiting for me at FedEX, my Sweepstakes winnings, and of course, the Nigerian Financial Minister’s plea for my help.
I’ll answer this as it is relevant to me and my job. I am a project manager for a large general contractor, and although I dislike emails tremendously, my world depends on them. I must correspond daily with architects, engineers, owners reps, and subcontractors. In a typical day I can receive 50 emails and send another 50. Most of them are detail oriented, and contain important information. And yes I read them, I have to. What irks me is the medium is now a huge information hole which I must react to, as I expect others to do also. The danger for me is that I can be at some big meeting, and a topic is discussed, and the person sitting across from me says “you know about that, I sent you an email”. Chances are he/she did. Maybe it was yesterday, maybe four months ago. So that leaves me with reading, understanding, reacting to, and remembering fifty emails a day. So you can see that over the course of a two year project, the chances of some vital bit of information being overlooked is huge. That is why I distrust emails, because most people “assume” the other party reads, understands, reacts, and remembers. So to answer your question, in my world, people are expected to read them. If I email someone who may not know me, I only occasionally get what you describe.
So to answer your question, in my world, people are expected to read them. If I email someone who may not know me, I only occasionally get what you describe.
These are not Hi-how-are-you eMails, but as I said they are not solving-the-economic-crisis emails either. Just asking a few pointed, in some cases “Yes” or “No” questions, and what you get back is what Matt, said to me:
“Great. Thanks”** **( LOL - Matt, post of the day stuff!)
So clearly, they have received the email, but paid no attention to the content - or they think I am an idiot!! 
I may be overgeneralizing, but the people who respond with a “great, thanks” are the idiots. (not you Matt, the other idiots)
Sounds great, Thanks
~Matt
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I get over 100 e-mails a day from co-workers, vendors, the like.
Maybe 15 are actually important. The rest I’m just being cc’d because someone thinks I need to know. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I don’t even reply to those, although if I did, it would be similar to what you write.
Two things.
First I know I’m guilty of not reading the whole thing. When you get a bunch of E-mails a day sometimes the “Long ones” only get a glance and sometimes an “improper” response. I try not to do that, but it happens.
Second, and no offense, but maybe your E-mails don’t rank as high on the priority list. I think this is only natural human behavior. I will respond depending on how busy I am, what the E-mail pertains to and who the E-mail is from in that order.
An E-mail about the funny kitty picture from a friend will get a “Great thanks” response unless I have nothing going on. But the same E-mail from a good customer will get a different response even if I’m pretty busy.
Obviously the “Sender” and receiver rank the E-mail at different importance levels so more than like the response you receive does not match the level that you expected.
For instance if you send a question to a customer about “What size suit do you want”. That’s pretty important to you for a number of reasons, however to a customer that is just “Shopping” may not be important at all and if they are busy may get a “Great thanks” response because they didn’t read it and assumed you included the information they requested not asked another question.
~Matt
Edit to add : Oopps that was supposed to be to Fleck.
Yes, but what a pain they have become.
The new trend I see is to copy everyone in the whole company to cover their butts, so every email gets 30 responses for no reason.
Mutlipy this by 400 and you get overloaded.
It is the classic “a small few have screwed it up for all the rest.”
Matt,
I know what you are getting at. Yes, you are right. Very often their is a difference in the level of priority from the sender to the receiver. People are busy. Their day does not revolve around my email. But typically, it’s a I-can’t-help-you-until-you-help-me situation. So the, That’s-great-Thanks response is good to get as an acknowledgment, but do they ever get back to answering the questions so that I can help them with what they do want from me? “Can you please confirm the size run for me. Is it S, M, L?”
Then comes the blow-up months later when they realize they don’t have what they want. An easy eMail trace will prove that they really did not pay attention.
While I would suspect that the email you are using and referencing isn’t a Gmail acct, Gmail does have what they call a “canned response” feature in the Labs tab. I think that speaks to a certain brevity of attention span and level of laziness in thought for the general population. Just an observation.
What sucks the most is that half of my emails belong to some other schmuck at the company who also has my same first and last name. People are too clueless to insert the middle initial so it defaults to me. He’s a big shot in the credit department. I hope he does OK because I’ve started just deleting his crap and not forwarding it anymore. It’s been two years. If he can’t get it through to his network of people (all internal to the company) that there are two of us, it’s his problem, not mine.
Dave
I agree with you.
And Matt was funny! (the first time)
I am in a bit of a snit with the people I work for because they don’t often get back to me in a timely fashion. And thanks to some mistakes (on my end and theirs) from not reading emails in detail, I now do cc extra people just to cover my butt and make sure other people are in on parts of this communication. In fact, I’m aggravated with them right now, because I question I asked them on Monday about some upcoming travel arrangements has still not been answered.
But it does irk me when I am talking to someone and they don’t know something I emailed them about…I’ll flat out ask them, “oh, didn’t you READ that email that I sent, since you replied to it?” And they say no, not really.
I have learned that anything important has to be in the first few lines.
I used to work for a guy who would call staff and tell them to check their e-mail. This was 1995 and I had just implemented a cc: Mail solution at the place. The owner was a tyrant but convinced e-mail was better than voicemail. We had to break him of typing in all caps. He always expected a reply within seconds, which is why he started calling staff and telling them to check their mail…kinda funny thinking back on it. Eventually he got the idea that if it really needed to be answered in second, a phone call was better.
I find myself replying to some e-mails in person, because it gets me out of the office.
Then comes the blow-up months later when they realize they don’t have what they want. An easy eMail trace will prove that they really did not pay attention.
And it will be your fault It becomes MORE important to them when hey don’t get what they want. An E-mail at that time would definately result in a more consice response.
I can definitely see how this happens. Customer sends in E-mail asking for a size small wetsuit. You get the E-mail and realize the customer did not specify what “Brand”. You send back a nice E-mail starting out with “Thank you for your order…” Customer doesn’t get any further than that and replies “Thanks :-)”
I’ve been guilty of that here on ST. Responding to something in the first paragraph and disagreeing with it, but the second paragraph supplies clarification.
I’ve actually changed my “E-mailing” practices to reflect this tendency. The first sentence to my customers or vendors contains the problem or question and the message header indicates the problem. It’s not as “Nice” as the “Thanks for the order approach”, which I still put in but last, but seems to be more effective.
~Matt
"Do people even read their emails anymore? "
No.
I learned fast that pushing send on an e-mail does not equate to anyone actually reading that e-mail, and most people do not read or comprehend well so e-mail is only effective to a certain point.
Fortunately, they still make telephones.
I agree and this happens a lot as well. It’s frustrating because people (at my job) don’t have time to really read an email and comprehend everything in it. I’m forced to give 1 sentence summaries which I’m pretty good at luckily.
And I’m about to go off on a tangent but it is somewhat related. People don’t have good attention spans anymore and I’ll use myself as an example. The influence of computers and instant information has caused my attention span to plummet. I try to read articles, blog entries online, or ST posts and I find myself getting bored within 2 sentences and then I move on. I am unable to concentrate for long periods of time without taking a “break” to check my email or Facebook account. I can’t sit still and do anything anymore and that includes watching TV. I “need” to be always doing something else or checking something else and all times. This is annoying and because of this, I am unable to really get into anything indepth whether it be a good TV show, an long email at work, a news article online or a book at home. I just have this constant “need” to be doing something else and I blame it on this constant flow of instant information has been perpetuated throughout society due to computers. And because of this, it is difficult to really connect with people and to comprehend everything that we should be paying attention to for more than 15 seconds.
OK, my incoherent rant is over now.
Emails at work usually go like this:
Short story: This system was broke and it is now fixed.
Long story: There was an issue with this system. What happened was that information fed into the databases and other software systems was correct, but these systems were not talking to each other. After doing a lot of research, we were able to trace the problem and found out that one of the cron jobs failed for some unknown reason. It has now been fixed by putting some error checking into the cron job and when it fails, we’ll receive an email. This will allow us to be able to trace the problem quicker in the future.
It is actually quite funny because the first line is best for people making $30k/yr or $150k/yr but the long story is best for the engineers and developers who actually want to know more about problems.