Stop 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header (2024)

It's a embrace-extend-extiguish play like the old days. Add a 'feature' that doesn't technically break the rules (or only does a little), get your users used to it (by making it the default, opt-out, etc) and hope that your users will pressure people not using your product to move. "What do you mean you didn't see my email reaction? That's the best feature in the whole world. You should really switch to outlook, etc.". See: every M$-only feature in IE.

This feels like something that should not exist, period. For any email important enough to actually send, asking people to guess what a single-emoji "reaction" actually means is a recipe for bad communication.

Even in outlook those reactions look out of place.

If it become standardized, it would be less annoying: you wouldn't receive shallow emails telling you that someone added an reaction to your email.

You would receive _something_ that your client could manage or drop.

If they didn't have thumbs up as an option, they'd almost certainly feel compelled to send an actual text to show agreement. Then you have to debate whether you need to send a text back to acknowledge their agreement. Thumbs up emojis are great! They mean: I'm happy for this conversation to finish now.

Thumbs up emoji can be considered as legal agreement (if you had previous agreements made same way), so it is no different than any other acknowledgment.

See case of farmer having to pay penalty for not delivering on agreement, agreed over a messaging platform with a thumbs up emoji.

Why? It's like an ACK.

No, that does not solve the issue. You still receive 'reaction' emails but in addition, the user you emailed in the first place gets an irritating email and they suppose that you are a dick. They are in some way correct, since they likely did not know they had sent an irritating email but you do.

The truth is, this is just another embrace-extend-extinguish strategy by Microsoft. Their business ethos is, and has been for decades, to make it irritating to use software not written, and controlled, by themselves.

Then I could look forward to the 14 response email thread containing just a thumbs up.

Upvoted because that’s about the only way to get the message away.

But having said that, please don’t do that (use the “report spam” as a method to stop one specific action).

I was the technical lead for a small hobbyist group for an American sports car which was 100% mailing-list since it started in 1994. I joined the mailing list in 1996, and was asked to help (and finally take over) as the technical lead around 2004.

We had spam traffic pretty well handled with multiple opt-in confirmations: at sign-up, and yearly on the sign-in date. And every email had the proper headers for mailing lists, each subject line was prepended with “[TheNameOfTheList]”, as well as a human readable block of text at the bottom of each email with the proper way to sign out.

With all that going on, we were really solid until about 2015 or so.

Somewhere between there and the early 2020’s we started getting silently blackholed more and more by the largest email handlers (at the time, AT&T, Yahoo, and GMail). Long time subscribers would email me directly and I’d scour the mailing list system for a hint of what happened.

Finally through a friend of a friend we got hooked up with another person inside one of those mail handlers. They couldn’t confirm our mailing list specifically, but they said that even a single “mark as spam” report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users. No notification to us, no notification to the other users, just emails went missing.

By the time we determined what was going on, and having nobody at those companies to work with, we had dropped from a high of well over 4K users to below 300. We tried switching over to a Google Groups backed mailing list (around 2022), but by then the damage had been done and the few that still remained were not all that interested in being participants. I don’t think the GGroups list has had a message (aside from the “Hey, is this list still on?” test emails) in years.

So, please refrain from using the “mark as spam” for anything but pure SPAM emails.

One line is convoluted?

My employer uses Outlook/Exchange and those reactions are a lot less annoying than short mails expressing the same thing on mailing lists and also is an alternative to notes not really demanding a proper response ending in the void. (Like a fun/life sharing post)

Yes

Is it really that annoying?

It depends on the context.

If it's my mother acknowledging receipt of a recipe, then it's fine.

If it's a co-worker acknowledging receipt of a legal document, then it is both unprofessional, and annoying.

I mock my co-workers by replying with an actual e-mail message with the word "Thumb!" in it. They've stopped thumbing my e-mail messages.