Why you should ALWAYS CC someone • Hacker News Board

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#31

Post by TeeOff » Wed, May 09, 2012, 9:58 AM UTC

dsirijus wrote: post #13

3xBcF32xNi3kh7i wrote: post #12

Would you mind sharing the statistical sample size? It's hard to talk about statistics without it.

It was not rigorous, but here they are... Pre-Alex I've ran through 5 months of mails, which amounted to ~5k mails, and sorted them out (there was already label Waiting done for me). Post-Alex, in 2 months of mails the sample size was ~2k mails. Number of e-mail addresses contacted within those 7 month period is ~70.

So you send ~50 mail every (working) day? Could your sheer volume skew the result? (as in: spam people and they start to ignore you, put someone on CC and they have reason to believe it's worth reading?)

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#32

Post by n3x » Wed, May 09, 2012, 10:00 AM UTC

Very cool experiment, kudos, and i can see why it works. But did you actually say in the emails "ccing my assistant?"

Even if you didn't i am not sure how legal it would be. Just by ccing someone, you mislead the other party, eg that you have someone else in your company. Of course the argument for "don't use for important emails" is invalid, why you can mislead some and not others?

And when in doubt, i say no.

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#33

Post by oskarth » Wed, May 09, 2012, 10:01 AM UTC

You should try different names and titles for the assistant as well:

- Instead of Alex, what about Sarah (?)?

- Instead of a standard name, what about a noble rank / recognizable surname (+?)?

- Instead of CEO assistant, what about personal assistant (-?), accountant (+?), future candidate of CEO (+?)

What about varying the person(s) involved depending on the type of project? If it's a issue of numbers, involve some accountant. If it's about coding, involve a senior coder, if it's about direction of the company, involve a imaginary future board member. The possibilites are endless - just make sure you don't get caught lest you want people to think you have some kind of disorder.

Just the idea of having someone else looking over your shoulder could increase the conscientiousness a lot and keep people on their toes. If this got to become the mainstream way of doing things in some subcommunity it would be horrible though.

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#34

Post by helen842000 » Wed, May 09, 2012, 10:03 AM UTC

This is interesting because you're saying recipients are opening the mail and then choosing whether or not to reply after they read it. This shows e-mails are not just sitting unread.

I always figured that it was the subject line that mattered most and that once a mail was opened it was more likely they would reply.

I've experimented with improving e-mail structure. I always get a more detailed reply if I group any questions I want answering together as the final part of the mail.

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#35

Post by dsirijus » Wed, May 09, 2012, 10:05 AM UTC

TeeOff wrote: post #31

dsirijus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not rigorous, but here they are... Pre-Alex I've ran through 5 months of mails, which amounted to ~5k mails, and sorted them out (there was already label Waiting done for me). Post-Alex, in 2 months of mails the sample size was ~2k mails. Number of e-mail addresses contacted within those 7 month period is ~70.

So you send ~50 mail every (working) day? Could your sheer volume skew the result? (as in: spam people and they start to ignore you, put someone on CC and they have reason to believe it's worth reading?)

I send mails every (week) day, and favor it in front of any other form of business communication.

I've sent 17 since I've started this thread.

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#36

Post by dsirijus » Wed, May 09, 2012, 10:10 AM UTC

n3x wrote: post #32

Very cool experiment, kudos, and i can see why it works. But did you actually say in the emails "ccing my assistant?" Even if you didn't i am not sure how legal it would be. Just by ccing someone, you mislead the other party, eg that you have someone else in your company. Of course the argument for "don't use for important emails" is invalid, why you can mislead some and not others? And when in doubt, i say no.

No, no e-mail sent nor received had any mention of Alex in any way outside him being in Cc.

I hardly believe it's at all illegal to have an e-mail address in Cc field, even if it's imaginary. E-mail isn't Facebook. :)

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#37

Post by sfgfdhgfdshdhhd » Wed, May 09, 2012, 10:13 AM UTC

it all makes sense now. sincerely, alex@gmail.com

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#38

Post by bad_user » Wed, May 09, 2012, 10:16 AM UTC

For your statistic to be relevant, the experiment has to be blind: You must not know to which recipients you're sending the CC-enhanced version.

Then, the name of the CC-ed recipient may be important, so you have to do this experiment with multiple "imaginary assistant emails", trying out different variations of names (male/female, first-name/full-name).

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#39

Post by Tyrannosaurs » Wed, May 09, 2012, 10:20 AM UTC

eric-hu wrote: post #24

philbarr wrote: post #7

Perhaps, over the last two months you've been running the experiment, you've been thinking about actually wanting a response and have automatically been constructing better emails that people feel they can reply to. Unlike the "brain-dump" ones I sometimes get that just don't deserve a response. To be perfectly honest, if there's more than one person on the email, I'm more likely to hope it's not my problem...

So to design a better controlled experiment, the OP should write a statistically significant number of emails (>100...maybe 1000+) without sending them. An app should perform a double-blind study by randomly choosing half those emails to go to multiple recipients (all but one being fake) and choosing the other half to go to one recipient only. Anyone see any holes in this approach?

How about the idea of writing 100+ e-mails without sending them?

You'd be better off having a mail plug-in randomly selected whether to add a cc at the time of sending rather than hoarding them.

Your mechanism is valid as a trial but not particularly workable in the real world.

You might want to also control for factors such whether the mail is internal or external (assuming it's a company), message length (longer messages might be more or less likely to be properly read and responded to), message importance (you'd expect more replies to higher importance messages), attachments and so on.

Re: Why you should ALWAYS CC someone

#40

Post by mobweb » Wed, May 09, 2012, 10:23 AM UTC

dsirijus wrote: post #17

israelyc wrote: post #15

Really interesting, have you tested the effect on gmail priority inbox? it could explain a higher open rate.. and it would awesome to know that cc is part of their rankings.. [EDIT]- Also, if you all set with labels already, would you mind continuing the test with something like SigBuzz (g apps) to track open rates and keep us posted?

No, I don't use priority inbox.

I think he means that it might have an effect on other people's priority inbox. It could be that if an incoming E-Mail has another recipient, GMail thinks this E-Mail might be more important and place it in the priority inbox.