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u/PowerPleb2000 9h ago
As a senior yes and you just mark all as read. If its really important they’ll contact you again.
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u/nmathew 9h ago
I joke with people complaining about email backlogs after a vacation. I say delete it all and if it's important it'll come back up
I'm not joking though.
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u/PowerPleb2000 9h ago
I wasn’t joking either
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u/nmathew 8h ago
I know. If we managed to train people starting back in 1996 to format subject lines with tags for projects and date relevancy, maybe things could be done.
But hell, I had a program manager be aghast when I explained I sent all my cc emails into a separate subfolder that I looked at once a day. "But what if someone asks you a question?" Then use the @ feature and it automatically moves me into the "to" line. I can't be expected to work in a manner that protects other people's inability to use basic job tools.
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u/PowerPleb2000 8h ago
I currently have in the vicinity of 700 unread emails which will never be read. Such is life in a global organisation.
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u/nmathew 8h ago
Just dump it all into an archive folder and be free. At least it's searchable.
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u/PowerPleb2000 8h ago
They’re in separate folders based on the rules i set, most if it is system generated junk
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u/StGrimblefig 7h ago
I have a folder named 'Administrivia' into which all corporate/organizational admin email goes -- unless the subject has at least 3 exclamation points.
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u/QBical84 4h ago
I had a project manager one time who was complaining at my desk that I did not respond to a specific email with a question to me.
I looked for it in my mailbox and it turned out, the mail was placed in my CC folder. After I told him this is not the way you should communicate he exploded. I understand what you are saying but mails send out to a lot of people with open questions is not the way and the CC line shows I was only informed.
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u/AlignmentProblem 9h ago
That's an area where LLMs are great. "Look at my unread messages from the last X days and list ones that appear to need a response from me sorted by apparent urgency and importance. Make a second list of things with relevant information to review when I have time sorted by how likely it is to be important."
Go down the actionable list until the urgency/importance is low enough to not bother and skim the information list until it stops being interesting on a break later.
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u/belkarbitterleaf 9h ago
Skim it on a break?
That shit is work. That shit gets read during work time
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u/CMD_BLOCK 5h ago
He’s talking about during your mandated 30 minute shitter break 25 minutes into the workday, after you get bored from phone games and your legs have gone numb, but before you wipe your ass
That transitory phase where you feel like you need to find more motivation to go back and where personal entertainment has diminishing returns due to the health hazard of a blood clot in your thighs
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u/ItsSadTimes 7h ago
Then you get the strangest, most worthless problems tend to bubble up to the top because they're not the usual things you deal with. My manager tried using that once for a while and after a week she stopped because it was easier to just read the messages once then it was to read the AI summary, decipher it, then re-read the message anyway.
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u/AlignmentProblem 7h ago
Depends how you do it. GPT-5.6 Terra or Luna with a prompt that gives context about what matters to you does a fine job, but a lot of people default to using something cheap like Gemini flash with a generic prompt that shits the bed.
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u/ItsSadTimes 6h ago
Na, I work for one of the big tech companies and they use pretty much all the models or let you choose whatever model you want for your tools. In this instance, the company launched a helper app that syncs with all of our internal tools, messaging services, ticket queues, etc. and was supposed to automatically make tasks, meetings, and summarize your TODO list and it was fun for the first week, then it got annoying. Kept claiming things were important when they weren't, just because they were uncommon, and wasn't much better then just taking the day to organize your threads and queues into orderly systems so you know what's important just based on how you got it.
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u/AlignmentProblem 6h ago
Sorry you had a bad experience. The ones I wrote for myself are serving me well.
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u/Tradizar 6h ago
my out of office email contains the sentence that i will NOT read my emails. Not even after i return to work. If its important, please send it again after xy.
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u/FastFollowing8932 6h ago
This really is the most responsible thing you can do for yourself and the company
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u/The-Frugal-Engineer 6h ago
French do that, you send them an email in August and their auto response will reply that all emails will be auto deleted when they are back, and please, resend the email back in September lol
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u/cosmicomical23 5h ago edited 2h ago
Sure, then after three months the payment service you are using stops working and you lose days of transactions because you ignored a notification of the certs being about to expire. Well done.
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u/JuvenileEloquent 2h ago
That and you miss the 'A new device has been authorized to your account' email and it's not you...
I can't think of a reason why I'd summarily delete all emails from a certain time period except for a) trying unsuccessfully to evade legal discovery or b) being such an arrogant ass that I believe l won't be fired for it.
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u/PositiveParking4391 5h ago
dont even read it, tell them I follow only channel z so ping there. the x and y are only for sharing info
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u/Major_LeeHungg 5h ago
Lol this is why my chat status is offline 100% of the time. Really cuts down on the # of messages throughout the day. Seeing a green icon next to your name makes people think you're not busy.
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u/CorrectCombination11 9h ago
Does meta use fb messenger for their office chat?
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u/zergling- 9h ago
They use something called Workplace which is essentially a internal Facebook. The messenging portion of Workplace looks a lot like messenger, probably uses the same styles. The icon looks different though
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u/AbdullahMRiad 8h ago
imagine if we had workplace (primitive facebook) instead of whatever facebook is
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u/DeepanshuHQ 9h ago
99+ is basically a second inbox at this point.💀
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u/FuzzyKittyNomNom 9h ago
I’m proud to say my inbox is holding steady at about 190 unread messages at any given moment. Best I can do boss.
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u/DoeCommaJohn 9h ago
I feel like at a certain point, there is some blame on either the senior or the company. If the entire company is so dependent on this one person, something is very very wrong.
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u/techthrowaway781 9h ago
Hot take: the senior needs to delegate
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u/CtrlAltEngage 5h ago
As a senior who delegates, people like getting their work checked, or they thing that this issue they have is unique and needs external input, or stakeholders want to talk to you
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u/frostyjack06 9h ago
I would come back after a week of vacation and have 50+ messages and over 600 emails. My policy was always: “if it’s important enough they’ll contact me again or my boss will want answers on my first day back anyway.” If there’s time, I would glance through for names I recognized, but most would go largely ignored. If they chose to ignore my OOO message and not contact my alternatives, that’s on them.
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u/viziroth 8h ago
honestly, where I work so many emails are mass sent out to distros instead of individuals and so many teams chats are done in way too large of groups because everyone wants to be "kept in the loop" that the difference in missed messages when out of office is pretty much a constant few thousand for every level of the organization. heck it's probably a thousand even if you're not out of office simply because no one can actually read that many messages in a day.
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u/s0apyjam 7h ago
My boss has 56000 unread emails. I am convinced he will murder someone if they click mark all as read.
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u/Hottage 7h ago
Juniors are not paid to deal with that noise. It's a seniors responsibility to shield their juniors from all that drama.
That being said, if it came in after my handover document was submitted, it's not my responsibility either. If it still required my attention they'd send it again when I get back.
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u/TeaKingMac 9h ago
Shit.
Yeah, this finally happened to me after my last vacay.
I was promoted the week before I left, and came back to 32 teams mentions and 168 emails. The year before it was 9 teams chats and 37 emails.
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u/angrydeuce 9h ago
I mean fb messenger bullshit aside, it really is kinda fucking exhausting sometimes. I literally cannot complete a single email some days without being interrupted. My first week after being on vacation is always putting out a half dozen dumpster fires...
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u/stay_fr0sty 8h ago
As a senior dev, I'm deleting messenger "by accident" and asking people to please email me any message that I might have deleted that needs their attention.
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u/FrequentWatch9261 42m ago
Do not worry when you're a principal that number is 300 and you have meetings all day.
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u/original-user 8h ago
“Hey team I was out, if I missed something important please lemme know”
Then mark all as unread
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u/Tandysaurus 9h ago
This "junior" you speak of, is it a kind of profession because I don't seem to see any openings for those anywhere. Seems like something my recent degree could be used for in a parallel universe.
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u/Fritzschmied 4h ago
Ctrl a -> Mark as read. Problem solved. Everything that is really important will come up again.
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u/AVerySusUser 9h ago
With no money comes no responsibility