Seriously, you make an excellent point here about the frustration felt by those waiting for the reply (something I didn’t cover in my post). Even better though, I think, is your focus on business email that goes unanswered while “workers” rush to reply to social emails.

I think we are all guilty of doing it to others. While my post was really more about waiting forever to hear back from friends, you are very right that the real problem lies in the workplace. The rule of thumb seems to be, “if you can be ignored, you will be ignored”. Thus, emails from supervisors and good friends are replied to, but an email from another department that just needs some information might get bounced around or ignored for weeks unless they have a real “take charge” department head who will take up the case and get it elevated to your department head to get some kind of a response.

Which is kind of nuts when we have bosses basically telling employees to do their job and communicate with other departments.

Incidentally, I’ve since sworn off email for social aspects (there’s a post about it somewhere on them thar blog you referenced already), and it is going actually pretty good so far. Mostly thanks to Facebook, though.

1) The truth is that it is too easy to send an email (especially a cold-contact one) and the best thing is to sometimes “not engage”.
2) Email is more voluminous than ever. Here is a stat from ’06 http://is.gd/1Wpp
3) Dare I say we (in general) are not very good at keeping the recipient in mind when we craft our email.

So, I understand the disappointment, but there something we can all do about…