Or is this terrible etiquette!!!

[lizrta]

I feel terrible.

I drafted an email for DS' reception teacher at 20:40 this evening - but accidentally pressed send! I was hoping she'd pick it up in the morning, but she has just replied.

This is really bad form isn't it. Should I say something at drop off tomorrow?

What do the people suggesting this think parents do all day? DH and I are both in the kind of jobs where we often barely manage to nip the loo all day, never mind sending emails about the children during working hours.

I expect most professionals get emails at all kinds of hours. The onus is on us to manage when we check them and respond.

No problem at all @lizrta I asked for a copy of an invoice from a certain company the other week ... (I emailed at 4.15pm on the Monday.)

The bloke from the company sent it just over 33 hours later, at 1.00am (in the very early hours of Wednesday morning.)

It didn't bother me, as I didn't see it til 9am (8 hours after.) It didn't wake me or anything. I don't see any problem at all.

Only one time did I get wound up. I had bought an item from ebay on 1st December last year, and it hadn't come by 11th (when it was meant to be here.) It was for a gift for someone, so I asked when it would be here. The seller never responded to my message, so I messaged again 3 days later. (Now 15th December.) Still nothing.

I messaged ebay around 18th December, and asked what I could do as the seller had not responded, and the item was still not with me. Ebay gave me a refund within 2 days. Got no item but I did get the money back. I never asked for a refund, they just gave it me.

Then I got a ping on my mobile phone - a week later - on Christmas day afternoon, when watching a lovely festive film with my family after we'd had Christmas lunch. It was an email from this bloody seller. 'Why have you asked for refund? You never gave me chance to answer.' (I fucking did!) 'Answer with haste please, as I am not happy ebay refunded you.'

CHRISTMAS DAY at 2.30pm he messaged me. Now THAT was a piss take. I never responded. I just blocked him and put my phone on silent. But I was fuming for about half an hour. I thought 'what a twat!'

tl;dr you did nothing wrong @lizrta

*What do the people suggesting this think parents do all day? DH and I are both in the kind of jobs where we often barely manage to nip the loo all day, never mind sending emails about the children during working hours.

I expect most professionals get emails at all kinds of hours. The onus is on us to manage when we check them and respond.*

Well to be fair the conversation is more around staff behaviour, so not emailing each other evenings and weekends and not replying to parent emails in our own time. We can't really dictate what parents do.

However, if there's a general rule about only emailing during working hours it's easy enough to just do a "schedule send" on most devices now isn't it?

Of course it is. Presumably the staff are going to "schedule send" so I only get the emails at the time I want them too (outside working hours) or is this a one -way etiquette?

And presumably at work, where I receive emails from 1000s of different people over the course of the year, I should check with each one when it would be convenient to "schedule send" their email for? Because of course some may work nights, or have small children or all kinds of other preferences.

Or maybe it would be simpler if we all just send and look at emails when convenient for us, and don't look at them when we don't want to deal with them?

Honestly OP you are fine and need to not give yourself a hard time about this.

While I do understand the urge to be more considerate about not burdening people out of hours with additional work, I think this "email etiquette" thing has swung too far in the wrong direction and become a bit silly.

I've seen this on other threads where people have reprimanded posters for sending emails and in a couple of cases posters have said it could lead to disciplinary action at their places of work FFS. It's absolutely right and sensible not to bully people into responding out of hours but there's nothing wrong with sending emails out of hours. I would physically not be able to do my job if I was barred from sending emails outside of office hours. I'm on calls most of the day and I simply wouldn't be able to get it done if I were restricted to an "emails only during office hours" policy.

No one is held at gunpoint and forced to read emails out of hours. She can ignore it if she wants to.

Exactly @WrongSwanson

I am quite surprised how many people think they have the choice to only open up their e-mail when they want to.