To have filed all work emails received last week without reading or doing anything with them?

[MrsBertMacklin]

I had a tantrum in my head today at work about emails. I was on holiday last week, came back to 20 or so emails in one chain which seemed to just be a conversation about something. Others amounted to about 100 in total.

I've just filed them all with the reasoning that if there's actually one in there that I need to act on, the sender would have seen my out of office and will chase me at some point this week if they need to.

I know that puts the onus on the sender to nag and I will read the filed emails at some point to make sure I don't miss anything important, but 99% of mail I receive is a load of wank about stuff that has been covered in meetings, or is just decision making in progress.

I wonder if at some point business culture will just calm down about emails and start treating them as letters, or whether this is it now.

I am about to enter month four of sick leave, following an accident. I am dreading the amount of email awaiting me on my return!

Totally unprofessional and would give the impression of being flakey and unreliable. I don't expect to have to follow up on emails I have sent just because the recipient can't be bothered to check them, especially if they only get about 100 in a week. YABU.

Totally unprofessional and would give the impression of being flakey and unreliable. I don't expect to have to follow up on emails I have sent just because the recipient can't be bothered to check them, especially if they only get about 100 in a week. YABU.

Agree with this

I am about to enter month four of sick leave, following an accident. I am dreading the amount of email awaiting me on my return!

Can you not give someone else access to your emails? That is what we used to do for lome term sick.

I think YABU, tbh. 100 isn't many and if they're that unimportant, surely you can scan-read them for any points that ARE important and then forget about them?

I wouldn't appreciate having to chase someone because they didn't bother catching up with emails from when they were on holiday.

Totally unprofessional and would give the impression of being flakey and unreliable. I don't expect to have to follow up on emails I have sent just because the recipient can't be bothered to check them, especially if they only get about 100 in a week

Agree with this. There are times I send an email containing a letter that needs to be acknowledged, counter-signed and returned to me. I often get people's OOO stating they are away. I do make a note of their return date, but I expect them to be checking their emails, and signing/returning that letter. It's to do with contracts; if I don't get the letter, they may get taken off the contract, so it's definitely in their interests to sign and return, why should I keep wasting my time in chasing them up?

Still wrong IMO as you are increasing the work of someone else, many of whom may be too busy to make notes etc as to when x y or z is back from holiday.

Providing cover for absent colleagues is part of the job description. Everyone knows who they have to cover for and before you go off you are expected to provide a precis of your current work situation for them.

I like it, I can get 80 emails a day.... Self employed so not going to go down this route, although would really love to.

I think a lot depends on the sort of emails you get, and what your job role is - I get a lot of automated mails, most of which I filter and never read, even when I am in the office (I have raised the point about, "what is the point of sending these mails, if they're not going to be read?" many times, and am about to submit yet another report on the numbers involved - I get around 250 mails a day just of this sort, and there's NO POINT! This week have managed to get a subset of them changed to raise a ticket rather than send emails, as they are ones which do need to be acted on.)

I can set different out of office mails for internal and external recipients - there's no point telling external people to look at an internal website they won't have access to, but there's a lot of point in telling internal people that, as it is likely to have most, if not all the information, they need.

I also make a lot of use of Outlook's filtering capabilities. You can define up to 50 rules (I think - it also doesn't tell you when you reach the limit, just doesn't process them all.) And you can set highlighting on mails from particular people, things like that. It's worth investing half a day on playing around with these things, because of the efficiencies it will give you in the future. Does depend a bit on the version of Outlook, and if you use a different mail client, you'll have to find out what it can do - but most email clients will have some sort of filtering and rule set-up. Even Pine (unix-based command line mail interface [fond memories]) can do some filtering.

I'm not sure that ignoring emails received whilst you were on holiday is going to help things in the long term - maybe next time you go away you need to block out a couple of hours on your return to go through your messages and prioritise things.

On Monday I set my email to send an out of office message to anyone who mails me during the school holiday (I'm a teacher). Knowing that there are emails from the LA's SEN department, Social Services etc. that I'm expecting, I contacted them well before the end of term but still didn't hear back. My OOO message states clearly that any emails may not be read until 1st September so senders do at least have some idea of when they can expect to hear back from me and means that parents don't expect an immediate response to a question about which day PE will be on in September.

My dp runs his own business. When he was in hospital he relied on his staff to read the emails (as is part of their job). They didnt... when he finally logged on he had thousands. As a result he lost a lot of business. Not just new business but long standing clients...

oh lud
was that due to shit attitude or bad instructions?

OP it's people like you who make my job so frustrating!

100 emails is nothing! You could scan read them in half an hour, work out which are relevant, delete the ones which aren't and then prioritise the rest and work through the ones which need action taking

It's not hard

Just deleting them makes you look irresponsible and where I work would be cause for a disciplinary

People are not emailing you for a laugh, they need a response!

But sometimes an out of office message is enough response - it means I can put something on hold for a week or so, or if it's more urgent, then I know I need to find an alternative person. Quite a lot of the mails I get simply aren't relevant any more.

It really does depend on your job role and the (mail) culture there - not everywhere is the same.

Depends on your workplace and the job you do, but I think it's rare that you'd find an employer who found this acceptable so YABU.

100 really isn't a lot. An hour of skimming and sorting should easily have gotten rid of those it was completely fine to ignore, which will have been most of them.

Every one of the places I've worked would have dragged me over the coals for this.

I'd get fired for that - I think in most professional jobs that would be considered unprofessional.

My former boss had a tendency to delete once reading the subject then would complain non-stop about not knowing things.