Posted by fanf2 11/2/2025
It depends on the context.
If it's my mother acknowledging receipt of a recipe, then it's fine.
If it's a co-worker acknowledging receipt of a legal document, then it is both unprofessional, and annoying.
I mock my co-workers by replying with an actual e-mail message with the word "Thumb!" in it. They've stopped thumbing my e-mail messages.
Disagree - a reaction is a perfect acknowledgement and a clear sign of “you don’t need to do anything here”. If they send an actual email it could be:
Acknowledged, thanks.
By the way can you change X to Y?
This is what we used to say back in high school.
When you have actual "real world" experience, you learn that while language changes, there is professional language that you use in the workplace, and there is informal language that you use in a bar.
You don't use a single vocabulary for every interaction in every situation of your life. You alter your speech for the situation. You don't talk to the cop that just pulled you over, or the bank manager you're trying to get money from, or your mom the same way you talk to your friends watching a sportsball game.
You mean like articulating complete sentences?
In the logic presented in this thread, how is an emoji any different from the word "Thumb?"
It seems your colleagues do.
> To me - as someone not in the Microsoft ecosystem
And the fact that they are managing their own Postfix seems pretty clear.
As someone in the MS ecosystem at work, I'm using this feature daily (after thinking that it was stupid in the early days)... but I make sure to only use it with coworkers or partners that I know are in the MS ecosystem.
I 100% understand someone being annoyed when they receive an email telling them that someone added an emoji to their email.
Sometimes during the weekend MS is sending me an email recap of the reactions I received during the week and it pisses me off.
The email reactions should be silent and that's their goal: a quiet ack.
RE: Here are the plans. Ack <eom>
In that sense they basically make sense and it should be unmysterious that people want them.
Every time someone tells that something I use and enjoy is "the gen-z version" of something, I'm getting worried: is it me trying to keep-up with the cool kids?
Having a few "gen-z" in my team, I quickly came to the conclusion that trying to profile them in a single group was silly: they all behave differently, like every human ever did.
I think there may be two things at play here. One is that some people are just bad at adapting to social shifts and assume that everyone is the same way as them. The other is that people have gotten loose with usage of generation terms. So for some older people "gen z" = "person younger than me", while for some younger people "boomer" = "person older than me"
And both of those are problems with the speaker, so now I just ignore them and happily keep on doing the "gen z" things.
Anyway, the oldest gen-z is just about pushing 30 now, so they get to join us lame people with sore backs.
A Mail, even with just a subject takes a lot more space and leads somebody to answer to it which messes up the thread.
Yeah, that's why I came to like the feature. It's even visible at two places: in the thread list and on an individual email.
The only downside for now: the choice of emoji is too limited. I want my eggplant emoji! But given the history in Teams, where they started with a limited set of emojis, before adding all of them and finally allowing custom ones, I guess it's coming!
If these features were actually compelling people would use them without having to be hoarded by an corporate drone "adoption manager".
Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978073 - July 2024 (354 comments)