The question of whether to allow an email read receipt to be returned is always vexing.
Several years of my IT career were spent in the folds of the IBM family. You may be aware that IBM receives more patents each year than any other company on the planet. It is proud of this fact and encourages employees to develop and submit new ideas that might be worth patenting.
One night, during that creative transition between wakefulness and sleep, I came up with an idea: an alert that would tell you when the sender of an email had requested a “read receipt”. You will have noticed that most email systems now tell you if a sender has requested a read receipt and will give you the choice as to whether you would like to issue that receipt or not (that way you get to read the email and still plead ignorance later). However, back when I first had the idea, this functionality didn’t exist.
Well I’d like to say that I invented today’s read-receipt functionality, but I was pipped at the post. I submitted the idea to the IBM patenting office but its searches revealed that the idea wasn’t entirely original. However, in a display of benevolence (and perhaps pity) I still received an IBM “Inventors Certificate” for the idea, which is now proudly displayed within my filing cabinet.
These days I am probably just as interested in the psychological nuances that shape our workplaces as the technological mechanisms that drive them, and I’m fascinated by the psychology that compels users to request an email read receipt. While I can think of several reasons for requesting an email read receipt, most of them seem to boil down to a sense of distrust towards the email recipient.
Whether they like it or not, the recipient is forced into a conspiratorial role where they agree to issue that receipt, or commit to a sort of spy-vs-spy scenario if they don’t. And while I’m always mindful of the old proverb “never attribute to malevolence what can be equally attributed to incompetence”, the question of whether to allow an email read receipt to be returned is always vexing.
Apparently I’m not the only one who wonders why people use read receipts. Indeed, it has been suggested that we should now go to the next level and provide a range of read receipt choices to the recipient. For instance, we could provide the “I-have-read-your-email-and-it-is-a-load-of-crap” receipt, the “there-is-no-chance-of-me-reading-your-email-ever-so-don’t-send-me-any-more-receipts” receipt, or even the “I-was-thinking-of-replying-to-your-email-but-I-am-not-going-to-now-because-you-have-asked-for-a-receipt” receipt. Maybe we should just let everyone create their own adhoc read receipts.
In fact, there is only one thing more annoying than a read receipt and that is the email stamped “URGENT” from the boss’s PA. Usually, these deal with epochal issues such as boxes being left in the lobby, dishes being left out in the tea room or unidentified odours in the common room, and they usually arrive just before a critical project deadline. While it has, in fact, only wasted one minute of your time opening and deleting that email, the notion that anyone could think such issues are urgent typically creates such incredulity and frustration that you then waste another hour steaming over the insult.
Men far more patient than I have snapped when that email has also arrived with a
read receipt!
Gerald Khoury consults, lectures and writes in IT strategy and planning.
Write to the Editor at Technology and Business
* All fields are mandatory.