Posted by fanf2 11/2/2025
BUT… there is a keyboard shortcut to do it, apparently, that is not too far from my typical typing pattern. Because sometimes I end up sending a thumbs-up reaction email when I did not mean to.
This is incredibly awkward when it goes to some random external partner or vendor. And especially when I’m in the process of drafting a serious reply. One time a vendor saw from me: thumbs-up email, thumbs-up email, serious email dinging them for messing something up. The first two were accidents and could not be stopped or recalled.
I asked our IT team and apparently there is no MS setting to prevent these email reactions from going external. Which is insane because the internal/external email boundary is so fundamental to the MS365 value prop and security model.
I don’t really care for the Outlook reactions and find them out of place, but this implementation doesn’t break anyone else. It’s also exactly how Apple implemented reactions being sent to SMS recipients.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.
(First world problems...)
See case of farmer having to pay penalty for not delivering on agreement, agreed over a messaging platform with a thumbs up emoji.
The first world solution to their problem is Do-not-Disturb mode :P To keep the networking aspect: it's QoS! Helps me, can only blame myself for looking.
You would receive _something_ that your client could manage or drop.
But having said that, please don’t do that (use the “report spam” as a method to stop one specific action).
I was the technical lead for a small hobbyist group for an American sports car which was 100% mailing-list since it started in 1994. I joined the mailing list in 1996, and was asked to help (and finally take over) as the technical lead around 2004.
We had spam traffic pretty well handled with multiple opt-in confirmations: at sign-up, and yearly on the sign-in date. And every email had the proper headers for mailing lists, each subject line was prepended with “[TheNameOfTheList]”, as well as a human readable block of text at the bottom of each email with the proper way to sign out.
With all that going on, we were really solid until about 2015 or so.
Somewhere between there and the early 2020’s we started getting silently blackholed more and more by the largest email handlers (at the time, AT&T, Yahoo, and GMail). Long time subscribers would email me directly and I’d scour the mailing list system for a hint of what happened.
Finally through a friend of a friend we got hooked up with another person inside one of those mail handlers. They couldn’t confirm our mailing list specifically, but they said that even a single “mark as spam” report by any of their email users would blackhole the entire email for ALL of their users. No notification to us, no notification to the other users, just emails went missing.
By the time we determined what was going on, and having nobody at those companies to work with, we had dropped from a high of well over 4K users to below 300. We tried switching over to a Google Groups backed mailing list (around 2022), but by then the damage had been done and the few that still remained were not all that interested in being participants. I don’t think the GGroups list has had a message (aside from the “Hey, is this list still on?” test emails) in years.
So, please refrain from using the “mark as spam” for anything but pure SPAM emails.
And in this case, it makes me want to lean harder into it. If suddenly Outlook users, especially ones using enterprise hosted Exchange, suddenly can’t email people, then maybe this crap might get fixed. No one cares when hyper aggressive spam policies hurt you and me. They might care when it affects enterprises.
The truth is, this is just another embrace-extend-extinguish strategy by Microsoft. Their business ethos is, and has been for decades, to make it irritating to use software not written, and controlled, by themselves.
Funny you should say that. I think that people who cause me to recieve an irritating email with nothing more than "like [person] reacted to your message" are dicks. They are sending me an email phrased like there's some third-party intermediary keeping me at arms length e.g. "Mr Blenkinsop wishes it be known that he is aware of your recent correspondance and is approving of its tone."
If you can't fix the real problem - Microsoft and their gamification of email - you can correct the views of people who think that "liking" an email is OK, which to be clear it is not. Email is not a chat client. Use words to communicate to people, and if you don't think a "reaction" merits words, then don't send one.
You need a similarly hostile user education to stop thoughtless people wasting your time in chat clients -- the moment they say "hello", and then nothing else, send them a link to https://nohello.net/ to let them know they have just been rude and inconsiderate.
Microsoft has prior history for inventing Microsoft-only shit that fucks up other mail ecosystems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Neutral_Encapsulatio...
shakes fist at clouds
Seriously, though, this argument seems kind of silly. Do you not usually use words to chat? It’s fine that you don’t like this in your email but your reasoning is specious. “Chat is for emojis. Email is for words.”
You can of course chat in email, but it's unusual, there's usually a higher bar to responding; it would be madness if every email had everyone else in the chain send another email saying "I've read this", so that's not what people do. I only see "I've read this" emails if the penultimate email concluded the topic and that was all that's left to say. Hence why it's unwelcome to bring the habits of chat clients to email.
On the other side, text messages are essentially just small emails and your argument against “reactions” applies equally.
If someone was attempting to use email as such with me, they'd likely be getting no reaction at all.
Is that the case here? It sounds from my limited understanding like this is not difficult to implement and is even easier to turn off.
I understand the EEE model and the concerns with it. I just don’t think this fits that model. This is just a feature.
These "reaction" message seem about the same as that, and are no more or less annoying. If it became disruptive, I'd rather ask people to stop than fiddle with my server configuration to try to make it stop.