The “Thank You” email.
Love it or Hate it?
Besides my fulltime job as blog author, mother of 3 and all-around awesome example of womanness, I work part time for an insurance company. I prefer email over phone, because everyone in my industry likes a paper trail….its all about the E&O Sarbanes Oxley, baby! So I send dozens of emails a day. Inevitably, some of those emails come back to me as a “reply” with just the text “thanks.” I hate that. Its a waste of time. I guess they do it to maintain the personal touch, the politeness that email takes away. But, for me, its a nuisance.
Sometimes, when I see an email come right back after I sent it out, I ignore it, figuring its just a “thank you.” Usually it is, but sometimes its a “hey, where is the attachment?” or a “nice, but you forgot to schedule my aircraft liability on the dec page.” In those cases, I need to respond, but I sometimes ignore the return email because I assume its a time-wasting “thank you” email. My fault? I guess so. But, you can see how it happens.
My question to you is, is the “thank you” email a good thing? Should we keep doing it, as a society, because it brings back the human touch to cold impersonal emails? Or should we acknowledge that email is for down and dirty conversations and plesantries are not needed?
What do you think?
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I am bad about doing this on emails to professors. I have never had any complain about it, but I feel like in that situation they could make an issue out of it if I didn’t say thank you. I feel like some of them would think “well I took the time to respond to her question, and she didn’t even say thank you!”
But, in a business setting, I feel like it’s probably unnecessary, unless someone has done you a huge favor.
In business or personal emails why would politeness ever be a negative?
I would be happy to get the thank you email because then I know that I sent it correctly, it arrived promptly, and that someone read it. In the past I had a program that automaticially let me know when an email arrived and then automatically let me know that it had been opened. I liked that. I suppose if you send dozens of emails a day that would be cumbersome but it also is efficient. Now a days I do not have a program that confirms my emails and I miss that.
If we as a society want to use email as an acceptable, equal to phone calls, way to communicate then we need to make it accurate and predictable. It should not be “down and dirty” but it should be appropriate and efficient. Love MOM
I like the email TY to know that things were delivered and handled…. Is this age when SPAM overtakes a lot of mailboxes, it is nice to know that your email was read instead of deleted to the SPAM garbage can…