alt Hacker NewsDo not apologize for replying late to my email
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“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.”
-Donald Knuth
What an unpleasant attitude. People have emotions. If they're apologizing, maybe they feel bad. Accept it and get on with your day. A punctilious email etiquette isn't going to improve anything.
> Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable.
> It also puts a lot of pressure on me: what if I take more time than you to reply? Isn’t the whole point of asynchronous communication to be… asynchronous? Each on its own rhythm?
This one of those sentiments that makes me scratch my head. If this little thing makes you uncomfortable to the point that you need to write a blog post about it, how do you survive?
Such a weird thing to say, if this makes you uncomfortable, imagine how uncomfortable it makes the other side reading this.
It is common courtesy, not a big deal.
I don't know where the author is from but this goes dead against common courtesy in the UK for sure, and probably similar places like Canada and Japan as well. In Japan you might expect the apology to be longer than the email content.
I feel like the lag-time of communication was an important component of older forms of communication that has been lost. That's not to say that fast communication isn't a boon to society, of course. Only that slower communication gives you more flexibility in how you respond, and more time to think about what your response should be.
When the main form of long distance communication was the postal system, and letters took days to travel from sender to receiver, you could easily wait days, if not weeks, to draft up your reply and mail it out. The recipient on the other end wouldn't even be able to discern the difference between your delay and the delay from the postal network itself. It had some in-built slack.
When the only phones were landlines, if someone called you and you knew you were in a bad mood, the kind of bad mood that would invariably make you say something stupid, you could just not pick up! There were plenty of common, understandable reasons someone wouldn't be available to answer their landline. Then they could leave you a message, and you could call back when you mood improved again. Again, there was slack built into the system.
Now there's this cultural expectation that puts far more attention on your reaction speed. A text message with no immediate response could just be them not seeing it immediately... But actually no! Now we have read receipts too! You can't even pretend to have not seen it yet while you think of your reply. Some platforms even have the little "currently typing" indicator tell them how long you've spent drafting and re-drafting whatever message you ended up sending. A panopticon of communication. Now there's no slack. Any person anywhere in the world could try and get a hold of you with the same expectation of immediacy that a face-to-face conversation would supply.
Now of course, not every single person I might text, call, or send an email to, will have the same expectations for what is an appropriate degree of responsiveness. But, (speaking from my personal experience) I am absolutely miserable at reading that from social clues. I am left having to assume that, in the absence of some clear indicator to the contrary, whoever I am writing to will actually have rather strict expectations, and that allowing myself to be lax may very well give them a terrible opinion of me. (Though, the degree to which their opinion of me actually matters is a different question entirely!)
On the off-chance I ever do reply to some of the months/years old things that I've never replied to, then I will surely include an apology, because it's definitely rude what I've done.
I don't think many people in the real world worship the sanctity of the "Asynchronous Communication" principle above all else. Maybe the author is the 1/1000 that does.
E-mail was always asynchronous communication tool.
For people who like to see waving three dots in iPhone chat, e-mailing makes them anxious. So I understand that apology is quite normal.
It is a sort of generational difference, imho.
Sorry Ploum, just getting a chance to read this now and comment. Great insights!
I wish I could convince my friends online to fall back on email. So many times the "watering holes" have changed, and I've lost some valuable contacts in the shuffle.
I do feel there's far too much of a focus on instantaneous response in today's world, both at work and in personal life. If something I can give you is truly preventing you from moving forward then that's fair enough, but otherwise send emails, don't rush the replies, and let people plan their own time.
I can't for the life of me understand why people think it's OK to send and even expect plaintext email in 2026. There's so much content that requires formatting and non-Unicode support in order to make sense. Formatted text, lists, in-line graphs or images, tables, equations or other mathematical formulae, all of these benefit from a controlled layout that plaintext just doesn't offer or can barely approximate. Why would you limit your email communication like this?
A buried appeal to avoid top posting.
Good, but like all good things, top posting is why we can't have good things.
It isn't going to stop.
I get a couple of cold emails a week and I like to be as helpful as I can when people have entrusted me with their opinions/thoughts/concerns/questions. I also often don't find the time to respond until weeks or months later, at which point an apology seems reasonable.
I do like the idea of asking the sender to reply a few weeks/months later.
My simple route for handling slow replies:
1. Quick email saying “acknowledge, will work on a reply with estimate target date”
2. Proper reply ideally by target.
Guilty as charged.
Who keeps linking this guy's posts? I don't think I've agreed with a single one of his takes.
The author is Belgian. But the post is not about how to handle business emails in Belgium, or in general, it's about the author's own preferences in written communication.
I don't understand why everyone below is discussing how a person treats his own personal emails.
Old fashioned email etiquette and "netiquette" favored brevity and omission of pleasantries (and trimming quoted messages, etc.) because people were reading on 300 baud dial-up and it made the difference between taking 5 seconds to load your message or maybe a minute or more.
It's largely irrelevant for any technical reason today, but the old greybeards still cling to it (I'm one of them).
Reminding you of context is just weird, just scroll down an read you previous email
does this same guy ruminate when somebody holds a door open for him, or when hes asked how hes doing?
This may be more of a "me problem" than a "them problem".
I often have the experience that people apologize for being slow to respond to me. Whether they're on the phone, at a counter in person, or whatever. Sometimes they say "oh dear, this computer is so slow today!" or "please bear with me while I check this..." but many times it is a very pointed and pre-emptive statement that they cannot respond or comply with my request immediately, that it may take X number of hours or days or something.
I made a special request to a vendor last year, and the CSR said "oh gosh, we need to reach out to the manufacturer, in Europe, and you know how supply chains are these days... and..." and I literally said "no problem" and eventually, they did not even charge me for the item when it came in, months later. Likewise the dry cleaner always seems to protest that they cannot finish in time and can we please push back the deadline, but I feel like they are trying to shirk my business because they're overwhelmed, too.
And I've come to believe that this is mostly the result of me approaching with impatience and anxiety. I often reach a desk while breathless and make my requests more like demands with the utmost of urgency. I am not, in fact, that impatient, but I give that impression and people believe that I would be disappointed if they take too long. But I do tend to interrupt and distract people if they are trying to collect their thoughts, or figure something out.
My last supervisor used to do this all the time. Practically every email and every voicemail was followed up with apology for being slow. And I really think that he was very gently telling me not to be so impatient and anxious.
But also, there really is a business standard for prompt replies. If someone goes out-of-office, they are usually expected to put up an "OOO autoreply" that will tell you when they're returning. Because it really is business etiquette to respond promptly, or reset expectations by explain why you'll be late.
Is it worse to apologize to one who doesn't want you to do so, or to not apologize to one who _does_ want you to?
This would be an absolutely savage way to follow up on an email you never received a reply to three years ago.
I don't think that people are entitled to a quick reply, or any reply at all. Sure, a quick reply is courteous, but not at all an obligation.
You are talking to a human and they have feelings.
They feel guilty for not answering sooner and they are letting that known. It makes life beautiful.
Most people do expect timely replies to emails. If you act like taking days to respond to an email is normal, people will get very upset with you.
I mean, it's also an attentional commitment for me to remember your idiosyncratic apology-preferences. So I might continue apologizing for replying late to your email, unless you convince me that _everyone_ doesn't like this...
Apologizing for replying late to an email is common practice between colleagues in business, especially if your late reply has blocked that person from doing their job. I don't know who this Ploum guy is, or why he has a nickname, or why French Wikipedia seems to think he's a noteworthy software developer, but I hope for France's sake he isn't actually as influential as he thinks, because this could be disastrous for French-English business communication.
> Apologizing for taking time to reply to my email is awkward and makes me uncomfortable.
Get over it. No one is doing it for your benefit. They're providing a secondary signal about their own workload. Just ignore it if you cannot make use of it.
Thank you!
Lots of opinions either way. What's peculiar is the disconnect in some arguments here.
If you are serious and down to business, taking into consideration the cultural bit over the efficiency or value of the relationship is backwards; apart from taking hints about manners and future expectations of communication with your correspondent.
As someone who is often late replying to emails and feels compelled to put in an apology, it's because my experience is that most of the folks emailing me (that aren't cold emails, e.g. things related to actual work/activities) are generally expecting a reply within one or two business days, so when it takes me a month to get back to them a brief apology is in order. The apology isn't because I feel I've done something wrong, per se, it's because I know that my timeliness didn't meet their expectations and they may have had to move forward without my input. Sometimes that's fine, sometimes I'm an SME that they need input from and they may have been waiting and my lack of reply was a blocking action.
The quantity of apologies I write in email replies is directly correlated to how overworked I am from existing in a reality where the existence of unproven tooling causes more work to be put on my plate without any realistic avenues to manage it. When everything is urgent, it can be impolite to be explicit about your priorities, but waiting to reply implicitly makes the point that something else was more important, and that is something which has political consequences, especially in business. Ultimately, like any element of etiquette, it's about smoothing over the rough edges so we can all get along and to assuage any feelings that the other person may have that they got stiffed.
I wish things worked the way the author thinks things work, and maybe it does in the world of academia or wherever this person is insulated from the consequences of late-stage capitalism and the gnat-like attention span that social media has inculcated into the global population. But in the business world, especially in the US, and especially in 2025 onward, there is an expectation that every individual person can do the job of a team of 6, and that responses need to be done with urgency to every missive. That's clearly an unrealistic and unfair expectation, but because all of us want to avoid being starving and homeless, we do our best to meet that expectation anyway, hence why burnout is epidemic and we all hate the current timeline.
People who get so annoyed by other people’s habits should really work on themselves rather than writing long blog posts about why others should bend to their own world view.
Or at least make it funny.
Apologies for this comment!
In business communications, I believe it's common courtesy to respond to emails within 24 hours. If I get blown off, or if somebody takes 4 days to respond to my email, my impression is always that my counterparty views the matter as unimportant. For my part, if I reply late, and if the matter is genuinely important, I think it's proper and fitting to include a brief note of apology.
In email communications with friends, it varies. I'll often let conversations hang for a while until there's something new to discuss.