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

[YellowPolkaDotBikini1980]

Just to clarify I don't mean WhatsApp or text or anything. An actual email.

I was up at 2 am, I remembered something and sent an email. Something along the lines of 'just to confirm the Birthday Cake we ordered has chocolate frosting but is a vanilla flavour cake'.

I just wanted to be clear because in the past, with a different bakery, we had verbally said 'chocolate frosting, vanilla cake' but ended up getting just a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.

When picking up the cake, my sister was told 'and by the way, I don't appreciate getting emails at all hours of the night.'

Surely you turn off email notifications for you phone if you don't want to be disturbed. I don't think the Nigerian Princes and the 'Manhood extenders' are waiting for business hours to spam people's inboxes.

AIBU to send emails late at night?

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?

Exactly.

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.

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.

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 .

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!

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

If your phone's on, don’t most people get 100 spam emails overnight? And another 100 in my work inbox?

If they don't want late night emails they shouldn't be self employed or alternatively, they shouldn't check their emails at night. She is being ridiculous.

They are being completely unreasonable. You are in the right.

Why would you be annoyed by someone sending an email at 2am? No one’s forcing you to check your email and respond in the middle of the night. And if you choose to have your phone next to you all night with email notifications turned on and don’t schedule Do Not Disturb (not sure what it’s called on Android phones) for the hours when you might be asleep - well that’s your choice.

The whole point of emails is that they can be sent at the sender’s convenience and read at the recipient’s convenience.

No, it's not rude, OP. The baker was unprofessional and I would use someone else next time.

This ^
It feels like a lack of professionalism on the side of business owner if they haven’t done it and more because they mentioned it, the latter was just very rude.

@HotCrossBunplease it was a different bakery who’s got the order wrong.
@YellowPolkaDotBikini1980
it does not look like this person like to have clients, I wouldn’t recommend them then.

We receive emails at work right through the night, enquiries (different format) and social media messages as well. There is an automated response that says we'll be in touch as soon as possible in office hours etc.
All those enquiries come through to my own work email address as well so notifications are off.
Which is what you should be doing if you don't want to be disturbed during the night by work stuff. I need to keep my phone and certain things on because I have an elderly parent, but you can do that and turn other notifications off, they come through but are silent and I flick through them in the morning to see if anything is time sensitive.

Wouldn't think anything of anyone sending something through the night - only if they're on the phone at 9am bitching that it hasn't been responded to yet, which happens, and you probably could have answered their email plus 5 others while they're on the phone telling you off about it 🤷🏼‍♀️.

I know. You are missing my point.

Bakery A are idiots who can’t read an order and were rude about an email being sent at night.

OP now thinks, based on what Bakery A said, that everyone thinks like Bakery A about emails. This is making her think twice about emailing Bakery B out of hours.

I am saying that Bakery A are clearly idiots based on their ability to read an order alone, so OP should ignore any nonsense they come out with about emails, rather than treat Bakery A as the arbiter of how things work in the business world.

She is unprofessional, I wouldn’t give her my business anymore

It depends. I know people who bake cakes at home, they’re one-woman bands. Most of their business is done on their phone. I suppose your baker could have been woken by a notification?

Then that's the baker's problem for not managing her notifications efficiently. If you're running a business and thus expecting people to pay money for your goods or services, it's bad form to chastise them for contacting you in a completely normal way.

If the OP had rung her at 2am she might have a point, but not an email. Email is 24 hour. In fact I received 2 emails from our pet insurer at 2.30am today (info that I was waiting for, not marketing).

Totally fine to email an actual business in the middle of the night.
Mildly rude to email a freelancer in the middle of the night.
Extremely rude for said freelancer to kick off about it.

I'm freelance and I might have allowed myself a private eye-roll. Scheduling exists for a reason! But generally yanbu

I might include a comment saying something like "I realise that I'm sending this to you quite late but I don't expect a response from you straight away". I've seen on emails in a business "My work hours don't equal your work hours. Please don't feel obligated to read or respond outside of your work day"

A former boss of mine sent a very angry email back to someone who emailed him on a Sunday but the other person just had the best reply with ‘You didn’t have to read it on Sunday’.

I’ve also seen people put disclaimers in their signatures that they don’t expect immediate replies but are sending emails at times that suit them.

Policing when people send you emails seems like a good way to lose customers though.

Oh well, do they want your business or not?

Why though?

You dont have to read it when it comes through, you can turn off alerts at night.

Clarification:
2023: Bakery A got the order wrong.

2024: I made an order with bakery B on Sunday, to collect on the coming Saturday. On Monday night/early Tuesday morning I remembered that Bakery A got the same order wrong.

Remembering that, I decided to send clarification to Bakery B. The reason I mentioned Bakery A was to explain why I felt the need to send any sort of reminder.

When the cake was collected on Saturday, Baker B huffed about getting a 2am email.