‘What email habits and phrases make you cringe?’ – 23 greetings and sign-offs that will find you fuming

Do you ever reminisce or fantasise (delete as age-appropriate) about what the world was/would be like without the tyranny of the work email? Imagine the post coming once a day, slowly opening and reading letters, then chucking them in your in-tray with no pressure to answer them for at least a week.

Sounds heavenly, right? They’ve been discussing the soul-crushing feeling of opening your inbox on the CasualUK subreddit after Ticklishchap posted this:

Email has been built into our working and personal lives for decades now, but some phrases and habits used in emails – especially in recent years IMHO – stand out as irritating. Therefore I thought it might be nice for us to compile a little list. I shall start with two of mine:

– People who say ‘yourself’ when they mean ‘you’. For example, “I’ll send the report to yourself” instead of “I’ll send you the report”.

– Worst of all: People who begin ‘Good morning’, ‘Good afternoon’, etc., but don’t take the trouble to type my name.

– People who say ‘haha’, ‘hahaha’ or even ‘hahahaha’. I had an example of this recently, when someone who had promised months ago to write a letter to my 90-year old-mother said: “I was going to write to your Mum this week, but life got in the way haha”. Cringe!

I am sure there are many others, so let’s have some of your ‘favourites’.

And they were overrun with people who also wanted vent about this particular irritant, like these…

1.

‘My manager is a fan of asking a question and using multiple question marks after it.

“Are you able to help with this??”

Puts my back straight up as it looks rude AF.’
–HairyN0sedWombat

2.

‘I can’t stand this. Also people who text you and don’t get a reply as soon as they would like so send another message which is just ‘??’.

Gives me the absolute rage.’
–parasoralophus

3.

‘My email one is people sending multiple emails one after the other like it’s Teams instead of one, long email (which most of the time still wouldn’t have been that long).

However, teams pisses me off more. Specially when people say ‘hi how’re you’ and nothing else, wait for you to reply and then ask what they wanted. JUST ASK RIGHT AWAY I DON’T WANT SMALL TALK.’
–MischievousPangolin

4.

‘The only thing that does annoy me is people who don’t understand the different fields like CC and BCC or who reply to all for unnecessary reasons.’
–PM_ME_VEG_PICS

5.

‘Super personalised email signatures are the worst. If it looks like you copied it from your old MSN Messenger account, I’m going to think less of you.’
–Paradigm84

6.

”Friendly reminder’ = someone’s pissed off, what did I do wrong?’
–Icy_Mixture1482

7.

‘When you ask three bullet point questions and just get “yes”. Yes to all (that usually doesn’t work)? Yes to some? I don’t even mind YYN back but please read my short email!’
–lookhereisay

8.

‘‘KR’ or ‘BW’ at the end of their email. What do they do with all the time they save on typing out kind regards. I doubt whether the regards are in fact kind if they can’t face the burden of writing it.

Even more baffling when it’s part of their signature. Couldn’t even bring themselves to write it once.’
–Dragon_M4st3r

9.

‘Another one for me is managers who get annoyed if you don’t write every single email like you’re penning a letter to a 19th Century Duke.

“Your emails need to be more professional, even if they are to colleagues.”

“Mate I’m not emailing an important customer, I’m emailing Matt in accounts (who I’m mates with) to tell him there’s spare donuts in the kitchen, I don’t need to address him as “Sir” or end the email with “Kind Regards” to let him know he can have a yum yum from Greggs.”‘
–theartofrolling

10.

‘I used to work with an ops manager that signed off every email with ‘tks’. Made me wanna punch him in the face. Setup a damn signature if you can’t be bothered, but at least put something that doesn’t sound like a heroin addict clucking for a tick.’
–zeek609

11.

‘I had an old boss who would sign off emails and messages with “mny tks”. Also the same guy who complained about too much ‘text speech’ with the younger generations. He was also rather punchable.’
–Somewhat_Kumquat

12.

”Gentle reminder’. Gently shove it up your ass.’
–WalshyXD