- We use MS365 at work and colleagues “react” in Outlook with thumbs-up to my emails sometimes. Fine, I guess it is a lightweight way to signal support or agreement. Not too different from reactions in Teams or Slack.
BUT… there is a keyboard shortcut to do it, apparently, that is not too far from my typical typing pattern. Because sometimes I end up sending a thumbs-up reaction email when I did not mean to.
This is incredibly awkward when it goes to some random external partner or vendor. And especially when I’m in the process of drafting a serious reply. One time a vendor saw from me: thumbs-up email, thumbs-up email, serious email dinging them for messing something up. The first two were accidents and could not be stopped or recalled.
I asked our IT team and apparently there is no MS setting to prevent these email reactions from going external. Which is insane because the internal/external email boundary is so fundamental to the MS365 value prop and security model.
- This feels like something that should be opt-in, not opt-out. It feels trivial to have all clients that support it send a header stating they do, and it is ridiculous that the default is to allow sending reacts to clients that don't support them
- It's a embrace-extend-extiguish play like the old days. Add a 'feature' that doesn't technically break the rules (or only does a little), get your users used to it (by making it the default, opt-out, etc) and hope that your users will pressure people not using your product to move. "What do you mean you didn't see my email reaction? That's the best feature in the whole world. You should really switch to outlook, etc.". See: every M$-only feature in IE.
- How is this argument not just “no one should ever implement new features”?
I don’t really care for the Outlook reactions and find them out of place, but this implementation doesn’t break anyone else. It’s also exactly how Apple implemented reactions being sent to SMS recipients.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.
- Yes, we got the "you're just a luddite that hates progress" sophistry from you guys in the IE days (and before). "We're doing the same thing as Apple" isn't a particularly persuasive counter. I always appreciated Balmer in that that he didn't waste time bullshitting anyone that he was trying to create walled gardens for M$ products by cooping standards.
- Even in outlook those reactions look out of place.
- Don't worry, it's also probably going to come to other MUAs: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9078.html
- If it become standardized, it would be less annoying: you wouldn't receive shallow emails telling you that someone added an reaction to your email.
You would receive _something_ that your client could manage or drop.
- Oh yes, absolutely. I just suspect that the author of the blogpost wouldn't want even standardised reactions.
- Alternatively, report those emails as spam. Teach that great Bayes in the cloud that they’re unwanted.
- Upvoted because that’s about the only way to get the message away.
But having said that, please don’t do that (use the “report spam” as a method to stop one specific action).
I was the technical lead for a small hobbyist group for an American sports car which was 100% mailing-list since it started in 1994. I joined the mailing list in 1996, and was asked to help (and finally take over) as the technical lead around 2004.
We had spam traffic pretty well handled with multiple opt-in confirmations: at sign-up, and yearly on the sign-in date. And every email had the proper headers for mailing lists, each subject line was prepended with “[TheNameOfTheList]”, as well as a human readable block of text at the bottom of each email with the proper way to sign out.
With all that going on, we were really solid until about 2015 or so.
Somewhere between there and the early 2020’s we started getting silently blackholed more and more by the largest email handlers (at the time, AT&T, Yahoo, and GMail). Long time subscribers would email me directly and I’d scour the mailing list system for a hint of what happened.
Finally through a friend of a friend we got hooked up with another person inside one of those mail handlers. They couldn’t confirm our mailing list specifically, but they said that even a single “mark as spam” report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users. No notification to us, no notification to the other users, just emails went missing.
By the time we determined what was going on, and having nobody at those companies to work with, we had dropped from a high of well over 4K users to below 300. We tried switching over to a Google Groups backed mailing list (around 2022), but by then the damage had been done and the few that still remained were not all that interested in being participants. I don’t think the GGroups list has had a message (aside from the “Hey, is this list still on?” test emails) in years.
So, please refrain from using the “mark as spam” for anything but pure SPAM emails.
- I self-hosted email long enough to have done that song and dance too many times. It sucks.
And in this case, it makes me want to lean harder into it. If suddenly Outlook users, especially ones using enterprise hosted Exchange, suddenly can’t email people, then maybe this crap might get fixed. No one cares when hyper aggressive spam policies hurt you and me. They might care when it affects enterprises.
- I'd like the same option with texting. It's a pain to fish my phone out of my pocket just to see a "thumbs up" emoji.
(First world problems...)
- Thumbs up emoji can be considered as legal agreement (if you had previous agreements made same way), so it is no different than any other acknowledgment.
See case of farmer having to pay penalty for not delivering on agreement, agreed over a messaging platform with a thumbs up emoji.
- If they didn't have thumbs up as an option, they'd almost certainly feel compelled to send an actual text to show agreement. Then you have to debate whether you need to send a text back to acknowledge their agreement. Thumbs up emojis are great! They mean: I'm happy for this conversation to finish now.
- Why? It's like an ACK.
- UDP vs TCP, might not care to know it was received. It may be evident/insignificant... later.
- How it is different than if somebody responded "ok" or "sure" or any other similar message? Or is it also unwanted? How is the other side supposed to know that?
- I wouldn't say it's much different, also unwanted in certain contexts. Perhaps not know, infer/make a judgement call. It's just as fair to consider it 'unreasonable' as it is 'assumed'; many things can be true.
The first world solution to their problem is Do-not-Disturb mode :P To keep the networking aspect: it's QoS! Helps me, can only blame myself for looking.
- Could this not be solved by setting up a file that responds to the alt-text email with something like: reaction not received, send a real email cheers.
- No, that does not solve the issue. You still receive 'reaction' emails but in addition, the user you emailed in the first place gets an irritating email and they suppose that you are a dick. They are in some way correct, since they likely did not know they had sent an irritating email but you do.
The truth is, this is just another embrace-extend-extinguish strategy by Microsoft. Their business ethos is, and has been for decades, to make it irritating to use software not written, and controlled, by themselves.
- > the user you emailed in the first place gets an irritating email and they suppose that you are a dick
Funny you should say that. I think that people who cause me to recieve an irritating email with nothing more than "like [person] reacted to your message" are dicks. They are sending me an email phrased like there's some third-party intermediary keeping me at arms length e.g. "Mr Blenkinsop wishes it be known that he is aware of your recent correspondance and is approving of its tone."
If you can't fix the real problem - Microsoft and their gamification of email - you can correct the views of people who think that "liking" an email is OK, which to be clear it is not. Email is not a chat client. Use words to communicate to people, and if you don't think a "reaction" merits words, then don't send one.
You need a similarly hostile user education to stop thoughtless people wasting your time in chat clients -- the moment they say "hello", and then nothing else, send them a link to https://nohello.net/ to let them know they have just been rude and inconsiderate.
Microsoft has prior history for inventing Microsoft-only shit that fucks up other mail ecosystems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...
- > Email is not a chat client. Use words to communicate to people, and if you don't think a "reaction" merits words, then don't send one.
shakes fist at clouds
Seriously, though, this argument seems kind of silly. Do you not usually use words to chat? It’s fine that you don’t like this in your email but your reasoning is specious. “Chat is for emojis. Email is for words.”
- I don't think it is specious. Email == electronic mail, if someone sent you a letter you'd not send a reaction back, you'd sent a reply letter. But companies have been trying for years to make email more like a chat app. Threads come to mind. I I prefer folders over tags too.
- Sorry, no. You’re trying to carve out some special use case for email as if it’s primary use is formal communication. Email is used for everything from formal business communication to friendly chats to fwd:fwd:fwd: Grandma’s chain letters.
On the other side, text messages are essentially just small emails and your argument against “reactions” applies equally.
- We'll have to agree to disagree. For me, and the way I use these things, emails are formal, text/chat is informal. I've never and will never use email like a chat.
If someone was attempting to use email as such with me, they'd likely be getting no reaction at all.
- Haha, nearly all the people willing to email me likely know I'm a dick.
- Then I could look forward to the 14 response email thread containing just a thumbs up.
- I got a hilarious email from an MS Exchange sender the other day which was attempting to "Recall" an email that the sender had just sent. Yeah, nope, that's not how Mutt + fetchmail works.
- I used to work with people who would reply, editing the subject line to end with something like " ACK. <eom>"
These "reaction" message seem about the same as that, and are no more or less annoying. If it became disruptive, I'd rather ask people to stop than fiddle with my server configuration to try to make it stop.
- These custom email headers give me the vibe of vendor-prefixed CSS extensions like -moz- or -webkit-, except much worse.
- This seems like a convoluted way of adding a new header, at least compared to the http servers I know. Why is that? Maybe postfix is not the appropriate place to make this change and that’s why there’s no option to just add a new header?
- Is it really that annoying?
- My employer uses Outlook/Exchange and those reactions are a lot less annoying than short mails expressing the same thing on mailing lists and also is an alternative to notes not really demanding a proper response ending in the void. (Like a fun/life sharing post)
- I don’t see any issues with it using outlook either but from what it sounds like when people do it for emails not managed by outlook, they’re getting a whole new email about it? If so, I could see how that would be annoying.
- Yes
- Is it really that annoying?
It depends on the context.
If it's my mother acknowledging receipt of a recipe, then it's fine.
If it's a co-worker acknowledging receipt of a legal document, then it is both unprofessional, and annoying.
I mock my co-workers by replying with an actual e-mail message with the word "Thumb!" in it. They've stopped thumbing my e-mail messages.
- > if it's a co-worker acknowledging receipt of a legal document, then it is both unprofessional, and annoying.
Disagree - a reaction is a perfect acknowledgement and a clear sign of “you don’t need to do anything here”. If they send an actual email it could be:
And it’s super easy to miss.Acknowledged, thanks. By the way can you change X to Y? - You're that guy who everyone thinks is weird for doing the thing. In the real world language changes over time. We need not be dogmatic about it, you know what it means.
- "Annoying" is probably a more accurate word to describe what they're thinking. Coworkers have to remember to not use the reaction buttons with this one specific person who responds like an ass to them.
- If they annoy me, I can annoy them right back.
In the logic presented in this thread, how is an emoji any different from the word "Thumb?"
- In the real world language changes over time.
This is what we used to say back in high school.
When you have actual "real world" experience, you learn that while language changes, there is professional language that you use in the workplace, and there is informal language that you use in a bar.
You don't use a single vocabulary for every interaction in every situation of your life. You alter your speech for the situation. You don't talk to the cop that just pulled you over, or the bank manager you're trying to get money from, or your mom the same way you talk to your friends watching a sportsball game.
- You're that guy who everyone thinks is weird for doing the thing.
You mean like articulating complete sentences?
- > I don't want this.
It seems your colleagues do.
- I'm not sure they are talking about their colleagues:
> To me - as someone not in the Microsoft ecosystem
And the fact that they are managing their own Postfix seems pretty clear.
As someone in the MS ecosystem at work, I'm using this feature daily (after thinking that it was stupid in the early days)... but I make sure to only use it with coworkers or partners that I know are in the MS ecosystem.
I 100% understand someone being annoyed when they receive an email telling them that someone added an emoji to their email.
Sometimes during the weekend MS is sending me an email recap of the reactions I received during the week and it pisses me off.
The email reactions should be silent and that's their goal: a quiet ack.
- The problem with this is embrace extend extinguish. The way Microsoft adds features to email that only work well in their ecosystem and annoy everyone else is a clear extend phase in progress
- Yeah that's why I didn't quite welcomed the feature at first: that's just MS adding their stuff and not following a standard.
- Google is trying a similar strategy with AMP for email[1]. I think we're going to miss interoperable email once it's gone.
- Yeah. I think reactions emojis are just the gen-z version of the subject line:
RE: Here are the plans. Ack <eom>
In that sense they basically make sense and it should be unmysterious that people want them.
- > I think reactions emojis are just the gen-z version
Every time someone tells that something I use and enjoy is "the gen-z version" of something, I'm getting worried: is it me trying to keep-up with the cool kids?
Having a few "gen-z" in my team, I quickly came to the conclusion that trying to profile them in a single group was silly: they all behave differently, like every human ever did.
- As someone squarely in gen y. I've had the same feelings about me doing stuff that others are associating with gen z.
I think there may be two things at play here. One is that some people are just bad at adapting to social shifts and assume that everyone is the same way as them. The other is that people have gotten loose with usage of generation terms. So for some older people "gen z" = "person younger than me", while for some younger people "boomer" = "person older than me"
And both of those are problems with the speaker, so now I just ignore them and happily keep on doing the "gen z" things.
- FWIW I mean just as a thing that gen-z popularized, I don’t think they think they own the idea (well, I hope they don’t, I’m not gen-z and I use them).
Anyway, the oldest gen-z is just about pushing 30 now, so they get to join us lame people with sore backs.
- Thanks for your perspective, I must say that I agree with you
- That Mail is very different from reactions. A nice thing is that outlook can simply sum up the reactions and show them along the message in a non-intrusive way.
A Mail, even with just a subject takes a lot more space and leads somebody to answer to it which messes up the thread.
- > A nice thing is that outlook can simply sum up the reactions and show them along the message in a non-intrusive way.
Yeah, that's why I came to like the feature. It's even visible at two places: in the thread list and on an individual email.
The only downside for now: the choice of emoji is too limited. I want my eggplant emoji! But given the history in Teams, where they started with a limited set of emojis, before adding all of them and finally allowing custom ones, I guess it's coming!
- The emoji adds some new functionality for sure. That’s just the nature of iterative improvement, right?
- They don't either. Microsoft wants it. They even do all this adoption crap basically advertising their own features "did you react to an email today? Did you @name tag a person today?"
If these features were actually compelling people would use them without having to be hoarded by an corporate drone "adoption manager".
- Thankfully, their wants can be overridden.
- Colleagues simply don't understand the implications. The idea is good. The implementation is crap.
- Previously:
Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978073 - July 2024 (354 comments)
58 points by fanf2 16 hours ago | 66 comments