I literally had to set up a “Congratulations / Congrats” filter to auto-delete those emails because they were so frequent and numerous when various accomplishments across the org were announced. The party popper emoji at least makes that far more tolerable.
I see a lot of those too, and I am confused at the purpose. Clearly congratulations are warranted, but it would be much less wasteful of everyone's time if those were sent directly to the person being congratulated, rather than to the entire org / company / world.
Is this just the sender looking for visibility? Does the recipient appreciate that yet another middle manager CC'd the whole company on a single sentence congratulatory message? Is there some other social function at work here that I don't understand?
Sometimes I think it would be funny if all the individual contributors coordinated to ALSO reply-all with "Congratulations", but it would become clear pretty quickly that something was up, and it's a mean thing to do to whomever is being congratulated.
I’m not an Outlook user, and I really dislike the product.
But I wish the feature that you can write say @joel to get someone’s attention in large email threads with too many on CC would have been adopted by more mail clients.
My mental model is Exchange is a really database, Outlook is a database client, and SMTP is bolted on the side. Things that make sense in the MS ecosystem map poorly onto SMTP/conventional email, but that doesn't stop them foisting it on everyone...
That’s the ideal but it’s not what I’ve observed in practice. In my org, people send reactions and reply all emails like this. It’s just more distraction.
Yes, sometimes I think it's probably accidental and they hit "reply all" instead of "reply". Some people though I don't think understand the difference between the two...
Make no fáking sense still receiving those stupid internal emails that 'Your Colleague Joe reacted to your email', and then the reaction is a censored picture of course, because they protect your privacy in the most stupid way saving you from their own reaction picture too.
They should use Teams then, MS is in the process implementing untold horror into that one (my unfortunate friend works there) where they could live out nighmarish feature dreams and leave the email for actual content. Or keep all emails inside the company - send out the pigeons! - for f's sake then if they insist emoji based infantile communication.
Apple added the same thing for iMessage/SMS. It worked as expected if the group message was all Apple users. But if you were the unfortunate person outside the ecosystem, you would get spammed with ‘{person} liked “{message}”’.
In some cases, people would react to the reaction leading to some ridiculous chains of text.
This reminds of when Microsoft released a comic strip chat client for IRC. You would have these people popping into IRC channels with all kinds of metadata about their character. It was fine for them, but super annoying for everybody with a normal client.
I guess it was designed to be used with MSN servers, but people used them to connect to the "regular" ones as well.
I like how you word this in the past tense, it still happens to this day. I live outside the states but keep a google voice number and in my family's group chat I still get these all the time. I've mostly (miraculously) moved them to Signal, but they revert to their SMS ways occasionally.
I no longer get those messages in the default SMS app on my Pixel 8. Either google or apple updated something, they now show as emojis on the original message as intended.
As an Android user, I often wonder if Apple users realize how stupid their replies look to non-Apple users. I wonder if I should tell them or just move on.
Until (very) recently iOS users saw the same thing you did, e.g. the text describing the reaction instead of the reaction itself.
The person sending the reaction sees it on the message like an iMessage, but everything in a non-iMessage group text (iOS, android, or other) gets sent the same “liked your message” text. Nowadays both Android and iOS parse those texts and apply the reaction as if it was sent normally, but that’s a decent change
Apple doesn't care what Android users think as long as the majority of Americans continue to think iPhone's are "premium" products, are willing to spend $1k to buy a new iPhone because they don't have a slot for an SD card so that's the only way to get more space, and genuinely believe YOU are the dumb one for buying an "inferior" Android phone.
I remember seeing that some people in the corporate world put a capital J instead of a dot in some sentences. I first brushed this off as some artificial corporate level of politeness that's not too forward (the hook of a J does indeed look like a smiling face). Turns out that 4xA, the value of J in ASCII, is occupied by a smiley face in Wingdings. I still struggle to get it how did the Outlook email client know which characters to convert in the UI.
So funny, my mother would send me emails from work and I would see J every now and then. First letter of my first name is J so I kept thinking she was just referring to me but she was sending a smiley face
The conversion from emoticons to wingding J's occurred at the server level. I've sent emails in Mutt through an exchange server that, when quoted back to me, had the ASCII smileys converted to J's.
Exchange converts all emails that go through it to HTML; it's wrapping the J in <font> tags to select Wingdings. Some Exchange installations do not provide plain-text copies of emails sent through them.
Haha I too was confused about this J character for a long time and took it for some corporate thing when I first started out on a full time corporate job.
Took me years until I got a windows laptop and saw emails in outlook.
Can an anti-reaction person explain what they find so distasteful about them? Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort to type is seen as disrespectful? struggling to see what the problem is
I value my attention. I don't spent it on artificially generated responses. If someone wants to communicate with me I insist they put in some minimum level of effort. Before email, it took work to write a letter, which helped weed out low signal-to-noise communiques. Messages the likes of spam, LLM-generated content, and reactions go straight to my trash folder. I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making me look at and hit delete on their message.
It may sound aloof, but I sometimes get hundreds of emails a day and it's a necessary filter.
> "I don't spent it on artificially generated responses"
This is no more artificial or disrespectful than a person looking across the room, catching your eye, and giving you a nod and a thumbs-up.
> "I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making me look at and hit delete on their message."
If they'd replied with a full email saying "gotcha" or "understood" or "like it" you'd have to waste your time looking at it and hitting delete. (In Microsoft ecosystem, this doesn't happen, reactions appear on the original email like Github reactions appear on comments in issues - it's nice).
For what it’s worth, I’m not a big user of outlook, but I use reactions a lot in chat.
I like receiving reactions specifically because they save me time. When I get a typed message, I often take time to think through whether the sender is expecting some sort of acknowledgement (confirming that I got their message letting me know that I’m welcome to thank them again any time!) or whether it’s polite to terminate the exchange by not responding. Overall, I spend far more time than I’d like second-guessing my words. When I just get a reaction, it serves as a form of acknowledgement that doesn’t demand further response and frees me from an obligation.
Geez. You complain about disrespect, and then you explain you want everyone to cater to your particular requirements and waste their own time (instead of using the feature designed to save everyone's time) because you... "value your attention"?
I, just like the blog author, disable remote images in emails. So I wouldn't get the "intended experience" anyway. Actually, does anyone besides Outlook users get the intended experience here?
Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or the standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward.
So it's not being "anti-reaction" in general, it's being against some feature that only works in MS email apps, which then pops up in broken form elsewhere.
I wonder if Gmail and Outlook interop on Emoji Reactions.
Gmail launched the feature in 2023[1].
I’ve personally not used the feature but emojis shouldn’t be images — they are after all Unicode code points. Not sure why MS’s implementation uses images at all.
> Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or the standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward.
Another old dog refusing to learn a new trick. If you want to talk about not part of email culture, let's not forget images weren't part of the original. So people got over that. They embraced it just like they embraced HTML emails and everything else. You can stand in the middle of the stream, but it's just going to go right on by you
Most corporate users are Outlook users - looking at the stats for some of our customers, most of their messages go straight back to Exchange instead of any other e-mail host
In email, it would just be an annoyance that bulks out the inbox. Not a huge deal, but filtering them out would improve the experience.
Reactions make more sense to me in a kind of communication where you're doing real-time conversational stuff and brevity is important, such as instant messaging. In email, it doesn't really add anything.
Two issues: It's not a standard, Microsoft just did this with the assumption that most people are using Outlook anyway. They didn't care how this would work for everyone else.
Secondly: What does it mean to get a reaction to an email? Can I interpret your "thumbs up" as a sign to go ahead with something, or is it just an "acknowledge, I got your email". If we more or less agree at this point that email are "for serious business" then we must treat it as such and provide clear and precise communication. Reactions are the opposite of that, they are more easily interpreted wrong, depending on context, culture or mood or the recipient.
There might be a really good and reasonable use for "reactions" in emails, but I seriously doubt that Microsoft went all in and made their UI/UX experts do the research and those researchers came back with a clear answer that this was great and here's how to implement it. Given that this isn't even a standard I feel like it's something someone did on a Friday afternoon to show that you could done it. The piggy-backing on SMTP headers have all the hallmarks of a hack.
It isn't materially different than replying "OK" in that both a thumb's-up notification and an "OK" reply both act as distractions from whatever meaningful activity I'm engaging in, the same with all the DINGS and BUZZES and BANNERS and POP UPS that vie for my precious attention.
I've struggled my entire life trying to control my focus, and it's like the rest of humanity has decided to go all in on filling our shared environment with even more distractions. It sucks. It's manipulative. Let me turn it off. Leave me be. Better yet, help me pay attention to the things _I_ value.
I am not anti reaction as such, especially when it's just a thumbs up, although I very seldom use it myself.
However I really struggle with emojis as a general concept. I don't understand a lot of them, and it seems people put a lot of hidden meaning into them that I have to interpret, and I feel the cognitive load is a lot bigger than if people would just type out what the fuck they are trying to say.
I think that the issue with emojis is that they're a kind of slang. Because of that, what they mean, exactly, is very dependent on the social circle they exist in.
When my friends use emojis, I know what they mean because I know them and the in-group slang we use. When a stranger or acquaintance uses emojis, the only way to know what they're trying to say is through context clues, like with any other unfamiliar slang.
So if someone I don't know well is using emojis, I just ignore the ones whose meaning aren't obvious given the context. If I think they're trying to say something important, I'll ask outright what they meant (and then get an understanding of how they use emojis and so are better able to understand them in the future.)
Not anti-reaction, but against instant message style reaction in email! Don't smear in what is not there, it was not about abolishing reactions from the universe, those have their place still! Like bicycle bells go with your bicycle not with a horse.
If you can't be assed to actually write something out, then why should anybody else think your reaction worthy of their time? If it wasn't worth anything to you, then it isn't worth anything to me.
Agreed - I find it a very nice way to effectively send a "Thanks" email internally without cluttering the recipient's inbox with "Thanks" emails... but this only makes sense to me for internal mails/workflows.
> Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort to type is seen as disrespectful?
No, it's exactly the opposite. "Reaction" responses are irrelevant noise that clogs up the communication channel and wastes other people's time and attention.
People don't usually manually type these sorts of reactions because doing so is not often worth the effort. But this feature eliminates the friction, and encourages people to engage in behavior that is effectively spamming.
It’s usually unnecessary and triggers notifications stealing my attention. If I silence them I might miss some actual change in conversation status. (Eg. Someone asks a question and the answer is in the form of a thumbs down reaction, if notifications are off I am unwittingly waiting for the answer until I check the conversation again)
Usually on multiple devices. That said, they are fine when on certain mediums. Chat and slack type stuff where it’s sync conversations that’s fine (although on larger groups and at work it starts becoming an asynchronous bulletin board more than a chat). Email is asynchronous and I only need the final response if the conversation even requires one. If I’m asking you a question I don’t need an acknowledgment reaction followed by an answer 3 hours later. Just send the answer 3 hours later. If I asked you a question and said I needed an answer quickly, you could say I can’t get it to you for 3 hours or if you never say anything I’m going to assume you won’t be answering me (that’s ok!) but if you acknowledge it I will assume you’re working on the quick response I asked for and if o don’t get it I’ll probably be upset or wondering what the problem is.
Anyways, in general we’ve built up a lot of norms for various mediums. Email norms don’t need to follow chat norms.
I asked a question recently to someone and got a "like" back as the "answer". I then spent one minute pondering wtf this message even was (it was the first of its kind that I received) and another pondering wtf the respondent meant as the question was not of the form "do you like XXX?".
This "feature", at least in this case, was not a form of communication of but a disruptive form of confusion.
This "feature" is not just distasteful but actively harmful and anti to accepted email communication norms. On Slack it's annoying enough but it's a norm so it is merely distasteful.
In email, I see it as yet another EEE method from Microsoft.
I kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further communication necessary”.
Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.
My friend interned at the FAA 20 years ago. He said the norm there was to write "Concur without comment." I thought that was brilliant. Of course, when I use it in conversation, no one gets my reference and thinks I am weird. But that is going to happen anyway.
I usually shorten it to simply "I concur", if no comment follows, it is a given. Maybe if you are using a lossy message format where a potential comment might get left out it would be necessary to make that part clear, but for most things it is a given.
Well that's what the reactions are for, right? Because then we have this sort of division between acks (and other reactions really) vs "actual messages". Combine that with specific emojis in certain social/professional circles and you've got yourself an extra layer of nuance in an otherwise tricky-to-navigate space!
Why do you need to respond at all? The phone tells you that the message has been delivered, and if you didn't ask a question or otherwise request a response why would there be any obligation to do so?
I don't even mind reactions to email inside a corp network where it can be handled gracefully, but sending an email like that outside onto the public internet is absurd.
Honestly if someone were to send me a message that only required a simple acknowledgement, and that person hypothetically had disabled reactions, I would interpret that as that person not wanting their message to be acknowledged. But I suspect what you’re really wanting is typed acknowledgment?
I don't like it in Slack as it gives another avenue for out of sequence communication.
When we think about email is that it is really explicit when there is something new to handle. There is a new email.
In Slack there are many channels with individual messages which can have reactions, and those individual messages can turn into threads which provides another place where you now need to actively scan to see if something is relevant to you.
This in general is something that bothers me with group communication that is non-linear. It's extremely hard to keep track of it all, and to catch up. Where do you start reading?
When we talk about email, it's much easier to filter for what is important. If your name is in 'To' or in 'CC' it's important enough.
Sidenote: the company I worked at encouraged people to put the group they're emailing into BCC, which makes discoverability as to which group the email was sent (and thus which group I am a member of) impossible to find out, as that information is purposefully hidden from me. But I digress.
In general I am a huge fan of purposeful communication, i.e. tagging someone when it's for them, vs throwing something out there and see who picks up on it or not.
Not to mention that I've seen cases where people get angry for you not having caught a message on Slack. If I wasn't tagged I might miss it. That's the reality of things if you're in so many channels.
Not to mention that leaving channels was frowned upon, as it is explicitly printed.
Even in messenger-type apps there's a weird setup. With iMessage, if you're in a group chat with yourself and other people (B and C): if C sends a message and B reacts to it, you still get a message about B's reaction to C. Drives me crazy in certain group chats I'm in.
Signal, for some reason, notifies of reactions to your message on desktop but not on mobile (at least iOS).
This solution breaks DKIM - it inserts new postfix headers. You can do the same thing in Thunderbird by going into the config editor and adding your own "x-ms-reactions: disallow" headers as per https://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers
Using reactions in chat apps is popular but I've never seen it have any practical purpose. I think the reason Microsoft added it to Outlook is obvious though, because it's popular in chat apps so somebody at Microsoft decided their old boring thing should have the popular new thing, because that would be good for their career.
In our company we work a lot remotely and everyone is in chat when working hour. Emojis are used a lot. It's much less disturbing if n people give a thumbs up to acknowledge a message instead of everyone typing a new message "OK". Especially when they read hours later.Also "working on it" is common if someone reports a problem.
Additionally emojis serves a social purpose. Instead of chatting in the office kitchen there are all kind of humorous reactions.
Readit News
Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you're genuinely thankful!
Is this just the sender looking for visibility? Does the recipient appreciate that yet another middle manager CC'd the whole company on a single sentence congratulatory message? Is there some other social function at work here that I don't understand?
Sometimes I think it would be funny if all the individual contributors coordinated to ALSO reply-all with "Congratulations", but it would become clear pretty quickly that something was up, and it's a mean thing to do to whomever is being congratulated.
But I wish the feature that you can write say @joel to get someone’s attention in large email threads with too many on CC would have been adopted by more mail clients.
Surely there’s an RFC for that right?
Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28636536
They should use Teams then, MS is in the process implementing untold horror into that one (my unfortunate friend works there) where they could live out nighmarish feature dreams and leave the email for actual content. Or keep all emails inside the company - send out the pigeons! - for f's sake then if they insist emoji based infantile communication.
In some cases, people would react to the reaction leading to some ridiculous chains of text.
I guess it was designed to be used with MSN servers, but people used them to connect to the "regular" ones as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
We have finally found the root of all evil.
The person sending the reaction sees it on the message like an iMessage, but everything in a non-iMessage group text (iOS, android, or other) gets sent the same “liked your message” text. Nowadays both Android and iOS parse those texts and apply the reaction as if it was sent normally, but that’s a decent change
Exchange converts all emails that go through it to HTML; it's wrapping the J in <font> tags to select Wingdings. Some Exchange installations do not provide plain-text copies of emails sent through them.
This was likely winmail.dat/TNEF[0], Microsoft's proprietary replacement of HTML.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...
Took me years until I got a windows laptop and saw emails in outlook.
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It may sound aloof, but I sometimes get hundreds of emails a day and it's a necessary filter.
This is no more artificial or disrespectful than a person looking across the room, catching your eye, and giving you a nod and a thumbs-up.
> "I do view it as disrespectful (more precisely, lacking discretion) that the sender decided to waste my time by making me look at and hit delete on their message."
If they'd replied with a full email saying "gotcha" or "understood" or "like it" you'd have to waste your time looking at it and hitting delete. (In Microsoft ecosystem, this doesn't happen, reactions appear on the original email like Github reactions appear on comments in issues - it's nice).
I like receiving reactions specifically because they save me time. When I get a typed message, I often take time to think through whether the sender is expecting some sort of acknowledgement (confirming that I got their message letting me know that I’m welcome to thank them again any time!) or whether it’s polite to terminate the exchange by not responding. Overall, I spend far more time than I’d like second-guessing my words. When I just get a reaction, it serves as a form of acknowledgement that doesn’t demand further response and frees me from an obligation.
Dead Comment
Second, "reactions" are not part of the email culture or the standard email specs. It's unexpected and awkward.
So it's not being "anti-reaction" in general, it's being against some feature that only works in MS email apps, which then pops up in broken form elsewhere.
Gmail launched the feature in 2023[1].
I’ve personally not used the feature but emojis shouldn’t be images — they are after all Unicode code points. Not sure why MS’s implementation uses images at all.
[1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
Another old dog refusing to learn a new trick. If you want to talk about not part of email culture, let's not forget images weren't part of the original. So people got over that. They embraced it just like they embraced HTML emails and everything else. You can stand in the middle of the stream, but it's just going to go right on by you
At least I don't remember anything similar in IRC or ICQ.
Reactions make more sense to me in a kind of communication where you're doing real-time conversational stuff and brevity is important, such as instant messaging. In email, it doesn't really add anything.
Secondly: What does it mean to get a reaction to an email? Can I interpret your "thumbs up" as a sign to go ahead with something, or is it just an "acknowledge, I got your email". If we more or less agree at this point that email are "for serious business" then we must treat it as such and provide clear and precise communication. Reactions are the opposite of that, they are more easily interpreted wrong, depending on context, culture or mood or the recipient.
There might be a really good and reasonable use for "reactions" in emails, but I seriously doubt that Microsoft went all in and made their UI/UX experts do the research and those researchers came back with a clear answer that this was great and here's how to implement it. Given that this isn't even a standard I feel like it's something someone did on a Friday afternoon to show that you could done it. The piggy-backing on SMTP headers have all the hallmarks of a hack.
I've struggled my entire life trying to control my focus, and it's like the rest of humanity has decided to go all in on filling our shared environment with even more distractions. It sucks. It's manipulative. Let me turn it off. Leave me be. Better yet, help me pay attention to the things _I_ value.
/rant
However I really struggle with emojis as a general concept. I don't understand a lot of them, and it seems people put a lot of hidden meaning into them that I have to interpret, and I feel the cognitive load is a lot bigger than if people would just type out what the fuck they are trying to say.
When my friends use emojis, I know what they mean because I know them and the in-group slang we use. When a stranger or acquaintance uses emojis, the only way to know what they're trying to say is through context clues, like with any other unfamiliar slang.
So if someone I don't know well is using emojis, I just ignore the ones whose meaning aren't obvious given the context. If I think they're trying to say something important, I'll ask outright what they meant (and then get an understanding of how they use emojis and so are better able to understand them in the future.)
No, it's exactly the opposite. "Reaction" responses are irrelevant noise that clogs up the communication channel and wastes other people's time and attention.
People don't usually manually type these sorts of reactions because doing so is not often worth the effort. But this feature eliminates the friction, and encourages people to engage in behavior that is effectively spamming.
Usually on multiple devices. That said, they are fine when on certain mediums. Chat and slack type stuff where it’s sync conversations that’s fine (although on larger groups and at work it starts becoming an asynchronous bulletin board more than a chat). Email is asynchronous and I only need the final response if the conversation even requires one. If I’m asking you a question I don’t need an acknowledgment reaction followed by an answer 3 hours later. Just send the answer 3 hours later. If I asked you a question and said I needed an answer quickly, you could say I can’t get it to you for 3 hours or if you never say anything I’m going to assume you won’t be answering me (that’s ok!) but if you acknowledge it I will assume you’re working on the quick response I asked for and if o don’t get it I’ll probably be upset or wondering what the problem is.
Anyways, in general we’ve built up a lot of norms for various mediums. Email norms don’t need to follow chat norms.
I asked a question recently to someone and got a "like" back as the "answer". I then spent one minute pondering wtf this message even was (it was the first of its kind that I received) and another pondering wtf the respondent meant as the question was not of the form "do you like XXX?".
This "feature", at least in this case, was not a form of communication of but a disruptive form of confusion.
This "feature" is not just distasteful but actively harmful and anti to accepted email communication norms. On Slack it's annoying enough but it's a norm so it is merely distasteful.
In email, I see it as yet another EEE method from Microsoft.
Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.
They launched it last year[1].
[1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/
When we think about email is that it is really explicit when there is something new to handle. There is a new email.
In Slack there are many channels with individual messages which can have reactions, and those individual messages can turn into threads which provides another place where you now need to actively scan to see if something is relevant to you.
This in general is something that bothers me with group communication that is non-linear. It's extremely hard to keep track of it all, and to catch up. Where do you start reading?
When we talk about email, it's much easier to filter for what is important. If your name is in 'To' or in 'CC' it's important enough.
Sidenote: the company I worked at encouraged people to put the group they're emailing into BCC, which makes discoverability as to which group the email was sent (and thus which group I am a member of) impossible to find out, as that information is purposefully hidden from me. But I digress.
In general I am a huge fan of purposeful communication, i.e. tagging someone when it's for them, vs throwing something out there and see who picks up on it or not.
Not to mention that I've seen cases where people get angry for you not having caught a message on Slack. If I wasn't tagged I might miss it. That's the reality of things if you're in so many channels.
Not to mention that leaving channels was frowned upon, as it is explicitly printed.
Signal, for some reason, notifies of reactions to your message on desktop but not on mobile (at least iOS).
We've had macros on computers since at least the 1980's. Just pick your standard acknowledgement and bind it to a hotkey, or a text expansion.
On macOS: Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements…
:)
(gah, maybe it's dangerous to even joke about this)
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/funny-or-ann...
Dunno why Microsoft decided to add the option to Outlook.
Additionally emojis serves a social purpose. Instead of chatting in the office kitchen there are all kind of humorous reactions.