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.
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.
You would receive _something_ that your client could manage or drop.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.”
You can of course chat in email, but it's unusual, there's usually a higher bar to responding; it would be madness if every email had everyone else in the chain send another email saying "I've read this", so that's not what people do. I only see "I've read this" emails if the penultimate email concluded the topic and that was all that's left to say. Hence why it's unwelcome to bring the habits of chat clients to email.
On the other side, text messages are essentially just small emails and your argument against “reactions” applies equally.
If someone was attempting to use email as such with me, they'd likely be getting no reaction at all.
Is that the case here? It sounds from my limited understanding like this is not difficult to implement and is even easier to turn off.
I understand the EEE model and the concerns with it. I just don’t think this fits that model. This is just a feature.
(First world problems...)
See case of farmer having to pay penalty for not delivering on agreement, agreed over a messaging platform with a thumbs up emoji.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Acknowledged, thanks.
By the way can you change X to Y?
In the logic presented in this thread, how is an emoji any different from the word "Thumb?"
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 mean like articulating complete sentences?
It seems your colleagues do.
> 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.
RE: Here are the plans. Ack <eom>
In that sense they basically make sense and it should be unmysterious that people want them.
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.
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.
Anyway, the oldest gen-z is just about pushing 30 now, so they get to join us lame people with sore backs.
A Mail, even with just a subject takes a lot more space and leads somebody to answer to it which messes up the thread.
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!
If these features were actually compelling people would use them without having to be hoarded by an corporate drone "adoption manager".
Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978073 - July 2024 (354 comments)