Is it rude to send a late night email to a business?

Emails are sent at the sender's convenience. They are read and responded to at the receiver's convenience.
Business owner is being ridiculous.

Of course they were being unreasonable. It was the baker’s responsibility to make sure they wouldn’t be disturbed by email notifications during the night.

This reminds me of when I texted someone I thought was a friend - we were in our mid - late 20s and I sent a message at around 9am one Saturday, only for her to get arsey with me about it later, because “I’d have disturbed her if she hadn’t already been getting up.”
Note, most people I knew were usually already up by then, even on weekends, and - hypocritically - some months before, she had called her best friend in the early hours of the night after we’d been to see our favourite band live in the O2, just as we’d finally drifted off to sleep.
We were sharing a room and said best friend had the loudest ringtone known to man!

Oh this would be so tempting to do.

I agree will all pp , it's fine to send a email of of hours, she needs to get her notifications set up properly.

I also schedule email to land in the recipient's in box when I think it best suits them , generally at the start of their working day or after a meeting I know they are going to be in .

I wouldn't give it a second thought, it's not like you were expecting or demanding a response from her at 2am. I own a shop and we're closed Mondays, but regularly get people sending multiple messages via Social Media on Mondays, each one getting increasingly annoyed that we've not read their message and replied to them right away. They're welcome to message us during non business hours, but there's not a chance I'm spending my day off replying to them.

So your sister ordered a cake from a baker who was too stupid to read instructions properly and then was rude about an email being sent outside office hours.

From that you have extrapolated that it’s rude to send emails out of office hours, rather than that that particular baker is an unprofessional idiot?

Of course it is fine to email outside working hours, as long as you don’t expect a reply until normal working hours resume.

Exactly.

Business owner is an arse.

People are responsible for notifications on their own devices, they can be switched off or timed to mute when they don't want to hear a ping.

Would the cake maker expect someone in Australia to wait up till 2am to send an email?

I get texts from my bank at 6am!
I'd send emails late - like you said I'm not expecting a reply or them to see it til the next day!

I have ADHD and POTS. I forget all the time.

Friggin schedule the email for 7am, you don't have to send it at 2am for goodness sake. I'd be annoyed by that too.

thats a them problem - turn off notifications after say 10pm if they dont want waking etc. Sounds like a microbusiness without proper boundaries in place

Totally agree

"It won't happen again because we won't be ordering from someone who is frankly so rude"

The Baker is being ridiculous. Turn your notifications off at night if you don’t want notifications at night 🙄 if you’d called her at 2am, I’d get it, but for goodness sake!

I schedule send work emails if I'm working outside work hours. But often with personal emails is as and when I get chance!

We have got this wanky statement on our work emails that say something along the lines of just because im working stupid hours I don't expect you to respond or something along those lines

I would have sent it but put it on a time delay, so that it went at 8am or something similar.

I would have thrown the cake back in their face! (The way my hormones are at the moment).

You are not rude at all.
It is up to them to turn off their notifications.

The beauty of email is they can be sent at any time and picked up at any time.

YANBU. What a shame you won't be ordering from them again.

You did nothing wrong. I send emails in the middle of the night if necessary, nobody looks at them until morning - unless they too are night owls and then won't mind but I've not generally had that happen.

Forget it.

Even if you do need to keep your phone on all night due to elderly parents/alarm etc, you can set your email notifications so a new email doesn’t ping or make a sound and wake you up. Perhaps send a passive aggressive message explaining this to cake person. At about 3am.

Not rude. I do most of my admin late at night. I remember doing a tribunal for my son and sending the barrister an email at 2am. She messaged straight back and we had a laugh about it.

Weird reaction from the business owner. You sent it when you thought about it, it's not like you were expecting an immediate reply

YNBU. I wouldn’t be using the business again (unless cake is amazing).

So, a whole FOUR DAYS after the 2am mail, she's still annoyed enough to make a snarky comment about it? To a customer? Wow. 'Amanda' really ought to get someone else to handle the client facing part of her business.
You, on the other hand, did nothing unreasonable at all.

Really unprofessional. I would email a helpful instruction about how to silence email notifications if they are linked to a phone. Explain if will help them achieve work life balance whilst maintaining a professional demeanor with clients 😈

I don't look at the time it was sent
I reply when I'm working
It makes no difference
I think they were rude

I love this. I don't know if I'm ND or NT, but yes to the fluffy irrelevancies to oil the wheels. I spend ages trying to get those right! :)

Wrt to the email timings, it's really the responsibility of the recipients to choose when to read their emails. It's not ok to decide to read emails at 2 am then complain about it.

I'd only use the scheduling if I didn't want people to know I was up at 2 am.

In this situation, if the changes to the cake had to be made first thing that morning, it's understandable the baker found the short notice difficult and inconsiderate. Otherwise, it's their problem for not turning off email notifications or for checking them at 2 am.