A reader recently suggested that I write an editorial about the psychology of returning emails. In other words, why is it that some people always seem to respond quickly to your email messages, while others wait a week or more to answer?
Most of us who send and receive a lot of email know plenty of people in both camps. For instance, one of the guys at Sunbelt I work with on the newsletter consistently answers my messages so instantaneously that I've accused him of being an "always on" artificial intelligence instead of a real person (Hi, Dan). No matter what time of the day or night I send a message, his response seems to pop up within a minute. On the other hand, there's a guy I work with at another company who invariably takes days or weeks to write back. If I need info for an important matter, I often have to resend my message two or three times. While the "next moment" responders may be a little scary, the email procrastinators are downright frustrating, especially when you need their input to get your work done.
Of course, some folks have good reasons for their less-than-timely replies. They might have suddenly been taken ill or be on vacation, traveling on business, or having an Internet service outage. In today's netcentric world, many of us have people we "know" only through the 'net. We may work with them online on a frequent basis and even feel close to them, but we don't even have phone numbers or physical addresses for them, may not know what state (or even what country) they live in, their race/ethnicity, how old or young they are, or in some cases even what gender they are if they have names that can be either male or female. I worked with an editor for one online publication for several years, all that time thinking I was dealing with a man, only to find out accidentally that "he" was actually a "she." Oops. Because our online relationships are so compartmentalized, we don't necessarily know what's going on in a person's "real life" that prevents him/her from answering the mail.
Another reason people sometimes don't respond is because they never got our message in the first place. With unwanted commercial email posing such a big problem, almost every ISP or corporate mail server implements some type of spam filtering, and many computer users have their own client-side anti-spam software running, as well. Unfortunately, none of these spam filters are perfect, and there are always some "false positives" - email messages that get blocked by the spam filters even though they aren't spam. If you don't get an answer from someone you've emailed, you always have to consider the possibility that your message didn't get through.
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