Noreply

There's an interesting pattern I've noticed, especially among people who receive a lot of email. They say "I try to read all the emails I get, but I don't get time to respond to all of them individually". It seems like a relatively natural response to a high volume of email. After all, you still want the nice experience of reading fan mail, but it's just infeasible to respond to everyone.

The problem with email is that we use it for two opposite things: receiving information and requests for information. A lot of emails we get require no concrete action at all, and those that do are often things like meeting invites that only require actions outside of the system. But the other kind of email is conversational, and actually expects a reply. In fact, often these emails have little content other than a request for you to send an email back. These are two totally different patterns, and mixing them up is hazardous.

Unfortunately, the fact that we use the same system for both of them often leads to mixups. We reply to emails that don't need a reply (I've previously worked with people who would always reply "thanks" to any email, and I really wanted to see what would happen if two of them ended up replying to each other). We sometimes don't reply to emails that were intended to be replied to, or miss them entirely because of all the other email. And worst of all, we turn emails that could have been purely informational into ones with requests in them just because we feel like we should.

To untangle all of this, I'd suggest something pulled from the big corp playbook: have a "noreply" address. Any email that goes to that address will never be replied to, but is much more likely to get read. The other address (your "reply" address) is for stuff that you will definitely reply to if you have read. Because of the extra load inherent in replying to emails, those ones will get read much more slowly, if at all. But the nice thing is that if you haven't recieved a reply, you know it's because the email hasn't been read yet, not because it's been read and discarded.

I don't currently get enough email for this to be seriously beneficial, so I've no way of testing it, but even so it's interesting to think about ways to manage the problems of overloading email with so many different kinds of messages.