How to navigate email etiquette in the modern world

Every day humanity sends 196.3 billion emails (at least according to the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm from California). Of those emails 108.7 billion are business emails and the rest are personal emails. While personal email levels are remaining static, probably being replaced by SMS and social media, business emails continue to grow at around seven per cent a year. On average a person sends and received 121 emails a day. So you do a lot of it, it is a part of your everyday life. Yet sending and receiving email can be an emotionally fraught experience. How do you feel when you send an email and don’t get a response? How do you then feel when you get a response a day later? What does it feel like when you get a response within minutes of sending? Emails are an emotional minefield that you have to navigate on a daily basis and thankfully researchers from the University of Southern California have developed a map to help you.

The study claims to be the largest study of email to date and involved people volunteering to have the Inbox analysed and monitored. The monitoring was not done by human eyes (to preserver privacy) and the data was made anonymous. The findings are certainly an interesting insight into how we use email and they may help you in deciphering what the time frame and nature of your email responses really mean.

How do you then feel when you get a response a day later? What does it feel like when you get a response within minutes of sending? Emails are an emotional minefield that you have to navigate on a daily basis.

According to the researchers, 90 per cent of people respond within 24 to 48 hours if they intend to respond. However, the most likely time for response is within two minutes and 50 per cent of people respond within half an hour. So what do you do if you don’t get a response to your carefully worded missive within a couple of hours? Well, the first thing you need to do is consider the age of the person you are emailing.

Younger people tend to reply to emails faster but write shorter replies. Teen emailers are the speediest responders with an average response time of 13 minutes, those aged 20-35 respond on average within 16 minutes of receipt, 35-50 yr olds respond within 24 minutes, and those over 51 take an average 47 minutes to get back to you. Men and women were roughly the same although women might take an extra four minutes to reply.

In addition to age it also makes a difference what type of device a person is using to receive your email. If someone is working on a laptop or desk computer it will take them almost twice as long to respond as someone on a mobile phone.

You might also get your underwear twisted trying to interpret the length of a persons response. The news is that you shouldn’t be upset by that apparently abrupt reply. The most common length for an email is just five words, while more than 50 per cent are less than 43 words, and only 30 per cent of emails are 100 words or more.

Just like we read body language, you can also read email language, according to these researchers.

Just like we read body language you can also read email language according to these researchers. When emailers first contact each other they mimic each other in length of emails but as the email chain grows this synchronisation disappears and then a delayed response will signal that the interchange is ending.

Then of course, there is the question of how you deal with email overload and this may impact whether you get a reply at all. Younger emailers cope with email overload by sending shorter, faster replies whereas older people respond to overload by replying to fewer emails.

As with life in general where timing is everything, so it is with emails. This study found that people are more active on email during the day than at night, that weekend emails get shorter replies, and that if you want a longer reply your best chance is to email in the morning.

Armed with this definitive information you can now stride boldy forth in the emotional maelstrom that is your Inbox and hopefully you won’t end up as psychological spam.