Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it would be better to ask, how do you expect people to communicate to you those things that would be expressed as reactions?
Using words. Same as here on Hacker News.
ok
Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
181–190 of 377 posts
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#182Can 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, 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, whi…
Reactions was also not part of the chat culture a decade back.
At least I don't remember anything similar in IRC or ICQ.
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#183Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#184Years ago MS decided to exploit IRC a very similar way by producing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat - IRC networks and Channel operators hated this shit. It would add a tonne of extra encoding characters that weren't hidden in normal IRC clients.
All of this was because they wanted the critical mass of users and didn't want to work at establishing it themselves at the time.
(The funny part of it being that on the larger channels and networks, Comic chat was completely incapable of handling reasonably the large amount of chat volume in a channel)
Feels very similar where MS' entire philosophy is, if it works for us, we don't care if we spam non-MS people relentlessly.
Course it doesn't work that way, Sys-admins just end up banning/filtering or doing other work arounds to prune it.
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#185This kinda reminds me of a feature Windows (Phone) used to have, where it would share your Wi-Fi password with the device's contacts automatically. To opt-out you had to add _optout to the SSID name. https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/30/windows_10_wi_fi_sens... It looks like this feature was removed eventually, but it's just one of those tasteless things that MS does every once in a while.
This just reminds me of my theory of Microsoft's checklist-driven development: Some PM writes down some single-sentence description of a feature (e.g. "Share Wi-Fi passwords with contacts") and the developers just read the list and find the single least-effort way of implementing it. Once done, they can tick the item off the list and go home having done their job, although often in the most excruciatingly stupid way…
Because this is Microsoft we shall apply Gates' razor and must thus conclude that "never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice".
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#186To be frank I quite like this idea. Can’t we standardize it somehow and add it to other email clients too? IMO the fallback, that internally it’s just a regular, human-readable email, is quite neat (though I wonder how they dealt with other languages than English - do they know which language the email is in? Is it just always English? That’d be bad).
I work on a chat component library (https://talkjs.com) and we support both emoji reactions and email notifications for missed chat messages. These emails can be replied to and they show up as chat messages in the conversation. It’d be very natural for us to add reaction support to the emails too, but I’d be reluctant to do so if it means a great UX for Outlook users but a terrible UX (overload of little reaction emails) for the rest.
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Personally, reactions serve as a fast signal for “acknowledged” that spares me having to see a new email that says “Ok”.
I think read receipts may be a better solution for what most people seem to use the reaction buttons for. Then again, I don't really care either way. I can see the value of email reactions, but that does require clients to build in support for the standard.
The text fallback also isn't great, I'd much rather they'd sendan email with nothing but the emoji than "person X reacted to your message". I suppose this is more corporate-compliant?
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was a good feature. Thankfully it still exists in iOS. Just requires approval.
The iOS implementation of this feature is perfect.
It’s cool but it’s not perfect.
I usually try to use this feature when traveling: either I or my wife will add the new Wi-Fi and share with the other. It works roughly 3/4 times, but the remaining 1/4 is infuriating because there’s no button to manually start the sharing and no info about why it doesn’t work.
I would prefer a reliable button to AirDrop the Wi-Fi credentials instead of unreliable magic.
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to disable that on my client. I never want to see reactions.
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 want my messages acknowledged, it's just The Generals Problem. I assume you've read it and understood it, if you don't understand or agree, let me know, otherwise don't waste my time, I don't need people to say Thanks, you're paying me to do it
Re: Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header
#190In an outlook only company, reactions make a ton of sense. They save tons of "great, thank you " emails. Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you're genuinely thankful!
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.