Email Etiquette at Work - Thank You and You're Welcome

[John Coloccia]

Maybe a pointless Friday question, but about 10 years ago at an employer at the time (large corporate), it was common practice to say "you're welcome" at least some of the time if someone sent you an email that said "thank you".

Out of corporate policy, they told us we may not reply to a thank you email, it was official policy to not respond at all in the name of efficiency, and the policy update we got went on to describe how much time was wasted sending emails that said "you're welcome", and how they tied up the email server.

Out of that habit, I never ever respond to any email that says "thank you". Is that the norm elsewhere?

I usually just do whatever I think the situation calls for. Since I work for myself, I no longer have an IT guy to setup corporate policy. I just sort of have to figure it out as I go along.

I can well appreciate, though, the havoc that all of those "Your Welcome" e-mails must be causing. I mean, it must be generating what....like a hundred extra e-mails a day? I mean, that's like TEN extra e-mails per hour....practically 2 every 10 minutes. That IBM PS/2 running your mail server, web server, dial-up network and storing all of your Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar files must be turning purple trying to keep up.

[John C Lawson]

I usually just do whatever I think the situation calls for. Since I work for myself, I no longer have an IT guy to setup corporate policy. I just sort of have to figure it out as I go along.

I can well appreciate, though, the havoc that all of those "Your Welcome" e-mails must be causing. I mean, it must be generating what....like a hundred extra e-mails a day? I mean, that's like TEN extra e-mails per hour....practically 2 every 10 minutes. That IBM PS/2 running your mail server, web server, dial-up network and storing all of your Lotus 1-2-3 and WordStar files must be turning purple trying to keep up.

A fair point, but the company I work for has 114,000 employees, and that stuff can add up. Also, the original objection was not the volume, but the distraction to the recipient.

We once had an idiot reply all to a company-wide broadcast email, and then another idiot replied all to tell him he was an idiot, then several other idiots replied all to tell them to cut it out, and so on. The resulting email storm brought the messaging servers to their knees for over an hour.

[Pat Barry]

We once had an person reply all to a company-wide broadcast email, and then another person replied all to tell him not to reply all, then several other persons also replied all to tell them to not reply all, and so on. The resulting email storm brought the messaging servers to their knees for over an hour.

This happens where I work on about a quarterly basis. Its ridiculous.

[Dan Hintz]

We once had an idiot reply all to a company-wide broadcast email, and then another idiot replied all to tell him he was an idiot, then several other idiots replied all to tell them to cut it out, and so on. The resulting email storm brought the messaging servers to their knees for over an hour.

Yep, happens at pretty much every company I've worked for... the bigger it is, the worse the email storm. At my last company (think high-level hacker types), it was done as a joke from time to time (which wore out its welcome a little less quickly than at other companies, but it still happened eventually).

Of course, the easiest way to stop such silliness is for people to send emails to distribution lists using BCC, not CC (you can't reply, therefore no storm).

[John Coloccia]

A fair point, but the company I work for has 114,000 employees, and that stuff can add up. Also, the original objection was not the volume, but the distraction to the recipient.

Well, he did mention that it was hogging their mail servers. My reply was tongue in cheek, but if we're going to be serious about it:

1) if sending a you're welcome, even from 114,000 employees, is somehow impacting the servers, the entire IT department should be fired.
2) if sending a you're welcome is somehow impacting your bottom line, everyone else should be fired too

Nonsense like this happens when poor management, lousy products and/or a bad business cycle is messing up your balance book, and some clueless chap in some meeting somewhere does a meaningless calculation and figures out that they can save 5000 man hours a year if everyone just stops sending "Your Welcome" e-mails, when the reality is that it's not a zero sum game. Just because someone doesn't send a note doesn't mean that they would otherwise be productive. People do things like that when they have a free moment to spare....maybe they're getting back from lunch and are settling back in...maybe they're sipping their coffee. Maybe, they're just in the middle of a thought. Either way, people aren't 100% productive even under the best of circumstances...and I doubt if you actually cared to measure it that they're even 75%...or 50%....productive except for short spurts during "crunch time".

In fact, if I was a betting man...and I am....I would bet that whatever miniscule benefit this policy MAY have produced has already been dwarfed by countless man hours of discussion, ridicule, head scratching whether a particular reply is appropriate or "breaks the rules", and generally increased negativity. Yes, I would take that bet.

This is the high-tech version of toilet paper rationing.

[John C Lawson]

[snip]
Nonsense like this happens when poor management, lousy products,...
[snip]

Yes, and yes. And sending support jobs offshore. And servers well past normal service lifetimes. We have no rule, however.

[David Weaver]

At the time, the company had a 250 mb limit on email and their server was constantly behind about 2 hours.

Someone's dumb idea was to blame it on the thank you emails. We (or maybe I) called those fixes resume builders. Do something that has no effect, take credit for it, and then write on your resume that you did something to help resolve email transmission delays for a company with 60,000 employees.

There were a lot of dilbert-ish moments there. One day, we had a discussion about trimming expenses, this being in a company that would send around their regional leadership on entitlement trips - go give a 1 hour rah-rah speech to the local employees, stay in town for a day, ride around in the most expensive car service you could find and order three bottles of wine at dinner. The car and wine was only shared in confidence I guess. Anyway, the conference call was to a division of the total count of employees above, but a substantial amount. It was decided on a webcast to all offices that one of the answers to trimming expenses was to not buy any pens for a while. After we got off of the call (where we wasted enough billable time to buy pens for 25 years), we were to all go to our desks and get all of the pens and pencils that we had above and beyond one pen and one pencil, and put them in a special box in the supply room. From that point, we weren't to use any new pens until the used pen bin was empty. After the call was over, of course, or local office leader (like PHB in dilbert) stood up and said "this is a GREAT idea. Everybody, let's get our pens right now and take them to the supply room!!".

There was a box in the supply room after that about the size of a flat rate box, full of old beat pens, BUT, there were a dozen or so fantastic pens in the box. I noticed nobody was getting any used pens out of the box, they were still using new ones, so I took half a dozen of the best pens and pencils out of the box (which were better than anything we were getting as new supply), and admittedly had higher quality pens and pencils to use than I'd ever used before.

[Brian Elfert]

My employer limits email boxes to 200 MB which is ridiculous in this day and age. We have plenty of disk space and plenty of server capacity to do more. Users complain about it all the time. I'm on the server team and we urge management to increase the quota every few months. One of the arguments against raising the quota is the claim that people will still fill up their quota regardless. The issue with low email quotas is that employees start using Gmail, Hotmail, etc for their corporate email and then we have no way to get at that email for defending a lawsuit for example. We know at least a few employees are doing this.

All employee communications are done in a way that users cannot reply to the entire company.

[John Coloccia]

At the time, the company had a 250 mb limit on email and their server was constantly behind about 2 hours.

Someone's dumb idea was to blame it on the thank you emails. We (or maybe I) called those fixes resume builders. Do something that has no effect, take credit for it, and then write on your resume that you did something to help resolve email transmission delays for a company with 60,000 employees.

There were a lot of dilbert-ish moments there. One day, we had a discussion about trimming expenses, this being in a company that would send around their regional leadership on entitlement trips - go give a 1 hour rah-rah speech to the local employees, stay in town for a day, ride around in the most expensive car service you could find and order three bottles of the most expensive wine you could find at dinner. The car and wine was only shared in confidence with people who wouldn't tell everyone about it. Anyway, the conference call was to a division of the total count of employees above, but a substantial amount. It was decided on a webcast to all offices that one of the answers to trimming expenses was to not buy any pens for a while. After we got off of the call (where we wasted enough billable time to buy pens for 25 years), we were to all go to our desks and get all of the pens and pencils that we had above and beyond one pen and one pencil, and put them in a special box in the supply room. From that point, we weren't to use any new pens until the used pen bin was empty. After the call was over, of course, or local office leader (like PHB in dilbert) stood up and said "this is a GREAT idea. Everybody, let's get our pens right now and take them to the supply room!!".

There was a box in the supply room after that about the size of a flat rate box, full of old beat pens, BUT, there were a dozen or so fantastic pens in the box. I noticed nobody was getting any used pens out of the box, they were still using new ones, so I took half a dozen of the best pens and pencils out of the box (which were better than anything we were getting as new supply), and admittedly had higher quality pens and pencils to use than I'd ever used before.

I joked about toilet paper rationing, but it's only barely a joke. I could tell there was some definite weirdness going on at your company. I've seen it from the inside many times. I've actually been through white board marker rationing. Like, huh? Just get me some damn markers so I can do my job and make us some money!

[David Weaver]

Do employees have the ability to archive more? We were under legal orders to not destroy any documents because of a lawsuit and had the 250 limit, anyway, which was an impossible combination. Once you hit 250, you couldn't send mail out to clients. When you asked anyone what to do, they said "we'll get back to you", which was an intentionally ridiculous answer to spin the responsibility back on the employees.

The dumb thing about it is an email archive with a 6 year old email is very useful - all of the data is attached, it's searchable, you can easily find what you need. In our case, they told us that if we had something we wanted to keep, then we needed to print it out, and that goes offsite in 2 years and nobody could find anything in a stack of printed emails, anyway. It's also completely worthless if the email had data in it, because you can't retrieve the data file later, and same thing on the network, files over 2 years old went away.

On the plus side, there sure were some expensive nice pens that went into the used pen box!!....peoples' personal pens that had nothing to do with company money, but they put them in there anyway for fear of getting caught with more than one pen, I guess.

[David Weaver]

I joked about toilet paper rationing, but it's only barely a joke. I could tell there was some definite weirdness going on at your company. I've seen it from the inside many times. I've actually been through white board marker rationing. Like, huh? Just get me some damn markers so I can do my job and make us some money!

Yeah, white board markers and erasers were sometimes hard to find, or had to be moved from conference room to conference room for use. It never made sense to me in a professional services company to do anything other than make the employees *want* to be at work, because the more they're at work, the more they bill, the more they're at their phone when a client calls and they get the work before the client calls someone else for assistance and it goes elsewhere.

As you may guess, they had a turnover problem (top to bottom). I stuck around longer than many, but you can only handle so many used pen conference calls before you decide it might be better to go somewhere else.

(because we were professional services, I got a glimpse at a lot of other peoples' expense control...like people would call and ask a question, get half of the answer and then say they only wanted the answer if you weren't going to bill for it....and a prof. svcs company doesn't make revenue any other way, so it's sort of like going to a restaurant and asking if you can have lunch, eating half of it, and then saying you weren't going to eat all of it because you don't want to pay for it).

[Brian Elfert]

Do employees have the ability to archive more? We were under legal orders to not destroy any documents because of a lawsuit and had the 250 limit, anyway, which was an impossible combination. Once you hit 250, you couldn't send mail out to clients. When you asked anyone what to do, they said "we'll get back to you", which was an intentionally ridiculous answer to spin the responsibility back on the employees.

We don't allow email archiving for legal reasons. We are not a public company so we don't have to keep an archive of all emails like some public companies. We only back up email for six weeks for legal reasons too. If company policy is not not allow archiving and to not back up email over six weeks then lawyers can't ask for old backups to do discovery. We used to keep backups of emails for months or years, but one time we paid something like $750,000 to have a forensics company recover all of our email from tape for a lawsuit. We were not allowed to do the work in house for fear we would delete anything incriminating.

We allow users to keep email indefinitely as long as it is not in their inbox. However, users are still limited to 200 MB for all of their email which discourages keeping email long term. If somebody is involved in a lawsuit then we start storing all of their email until the lawsuit is resolved. Keeping email after the fact is silly because hopefully nobody is going to send an incriminating email after a lawsuit is filed.

[Erik Loza]

Having worked for both Austrian and Italian companies, I consider myself fortunate to simply receive any timely response at all. "Best regards" seems to be the common closing salutation among Europeans who correspond in English. That being said, I always try to reply with a "Thanks", "You bet", or "Much appreciated". It's just basic courtesy IMHO.

Erik Loza
Minimax USA

[Mel Fulks]

With the relative newness of email I look to established letter etiquette. There are notes of thanks,but no "you'r welcome"
notes.

[rick carpenter]

So here's a blanket email that you can spam out automatically every Friday at 5. Should take care of everything...

"Dear [A. Friend / B. Regretful Acquaintance],

I [A. truly appreciate / B. was unable to use] your [A. advice / B. unsolicited meddling] in my recent issue. I found it [A. spot on / B. completely useless] and I [A. thank you very much / B. will block all further emails from you].

Your [A. friendship / B. irritating persistence] is of great [A. value / B. annoyance] to me.

[A. In all sincerity / B. If you contact me again in any way I'll contact my lawyer],
{Your Name Here}"