What do you make of this email response

[Yikitty]

Email sent by newish member of staff to senior staff member - 4 others cc’d in

Reasonable run of the mill email - enquiring about confirming a date. Email first line is “I hope you are well”

response:

”You don’t need to ask me if I am well every-time you email me unless you know something I don’t. Yes”

😂 that’s good to hear, best regards and have a great weekend etc

Rude. And just unnecessary tbh

Er why do you think we hate it?!

because we know it’s fake. That’s not a secret, I’m amazed you think it might be.

Emails do seem to have got fluffier over the years, especially with younger staff. I'm not a fan of the 'I hope you are well' thing on every communication, but I tend to model by example by not using it myself rather than humiliating the sender! I used to be a civil servant, and at that time (20 years ago) it was bad form even to use 'Dear' - we literally started an email with 'Person's name'. Even 'Kind Regards' was too fluffy for signing off. May well be the same now, but it was just a convention and you got used to it. I did once have a truly dreadful manager who used 'kr', which was worse than nothing as it sounded so dismissive. She was a complete piece of work in every way though.

I have stage 4 cancer and a colleague starts all emails to me with "I hope you are well". It's incredibly insensitive. I will one day reply "Still dying, thanks for asking".

It's a really inappropriate thing to say on a professional email. You have no idea what the recipient is dealing with.

I hope the weather stays sunny where you are

I think that response would have been better sent to the originator of the e-mail and not shared but I don't disagree with the premise. The 'hope you are well' is trite and meaningless but it seems to be expected so everybody (or nearly) is compelled to follow suit.

If I've been e-mailing somebody once during the day then I'll drop the salutations completely and just provide the body of text that they need to know.

"Even 'Kind Regards' was too fluffy for signing off."

Please don't tell me that they were still using: "Your obedient servant"?

Wow.
They are either

• horribly rude
• attempting to make a weird joke but failing
• autistic and being confused and blunt.

Hi mumsnet

I hope you’re well.

Anyone else finding this thread unexpectedly fascinating?

Chat gpt almost always adds some variant of ‘I hope you’re well’ to any email so I expect we’ll see even more of it. OPs rude sender is going to be incandescent!

I was in local government at the start of emails in the office. There was no messing. I'd send an email - Could you send me xyz by the end of tomorrow please? And that was that. We didn't say dear anything, we didn't ask how they were, we didn't sign off at all. I guess the recipient knew who the message was from by the email address. It was all short and to the point and lovely.
I had a break from work, went back into local government and was quite confused about how things had changed. It had gone all dear this, hope you had a good weekend and kind regards... what a waste of typing. 😂

It's a pretty rude reply, especially copying others in, but I agree the sentiment. If you're emailing me just get to the point, haven't got time to wade through fluff.

I hate people writing that.
They are usually people who don't know me.
And they don't care.

As if they expect a reply saying no, not well, very unwell, got some awful condition.....

Why would you even bother??

Absolutely pathetic response and horrible for a senior person to respond so rudely to a junior person. Even if pleasantries isn't their style, it takes one second to read and can just be ignored. Some people think they're so important.

Takes less than a second to "wade" through four words.

So you prefer "I wish you ill" instead?

My intention was to be polite. I will make a note not to do that again.

To not enquire about their health or to not be polite?

I can't get my head around people being so irritated by pleasantries. You must seriously have nothing going on in your life to notice or be bothered by this. It actually explains a bit about some posters on MN...

I say please and thanks in a shop, all pointless words but it's manners. I may eye contact with staff. I don't work in an office now but I probably would say I hope you are keeping well. Because guess what, I actually do hope that my colleague or client is keeping well! And if I tell someone I hope they have a good weekend it's because I mean it, I wouldn't hope someone has a bad weekend surely?

I think it's fair enough regarding internal communication to have a company policy that there is no need for pleasantries just find attached etc. That's a training issue.

I would just reply 'noted' and be really curt in future to that person. And secretly hope they come in using crutches or in a cast sometime and make a point of pretending to not notice.

I can't stand insincere waffle like

Dear Ms Oolive
I hope you are well.

It's the same as being served in a shop and the assistant you've never seen before says "how are you". Fuck off. Stop this bullshit.

I am finding this thread enlightening and depressing. Who cares what opening their colleagues use for an email ? As long as it I'd polite ( and therefore professional) surely absolutely no one would have time or notice....
Of course if it is some t* writing things in capitals or something fair enough, that might be a bit annoying Athough probably not , depending on where you work and the variety of human life found there.
Don't swear the small stuff. Work emails are the ultimate representation of the small stuff as far as I know .

Yeah this is great. You need something sarcastic

Meh. Odds are if a particular person is writing it, if there aren't already about 16 people copied in, they've clearly BCCd them in to set the stage for some sort of fuckery that usually ends up with other people being forced to take on more of the sender's workload.

They're not wishing me well (or ill), they're wishing 'I hope the manager falls for this and makes her responsible for something else I don't like doing'.

As opposed to the other trend I’ve noticed where the shop assistant just doesn’t acknowledge or talk to you in any way???

We are all different but surely some niceties don’t do any harm whereas being fucking rude will piss a lot of people off.

I have only ever enquired after someone's health once, asking for a reference from someone I had not been in touch after retirement.
I'm old-school enough to treat an email like a letter when addressing people I haven't met: Full name/Yours sincerely.
When working with people for ages, first name and sincerely.

I first encountered Kind regards when I came to Australia. Bleurghhhh.

This. I’m creasing up that the senior person here thinks it’s so pointless to write ‘hope you are well’ in a generic email to a group of people but takes the time to email everyone ranting and raving about it. Idiot