You're applying an inconsistent standard here.

> No need to get moralistic about it. [...] It’s presumptuous to assume everyone else must adopt a workflow that works for you.

The premise of this discussion is a post titled "It is your responsibility to follow up".

Different people work different ways. But if email is a part of your work, then part of your job is handling your email in a reasonable fashion. Asking other people to work around your broken workflow (send it N times because I can't keep track) is unprofessional.

Email isn't about you. It's about you communicating with other people. If your way of handling email hinders that, then your way of handling email is broken.

Now, if other people are seeking free, unsolicited help from you, then yes, expecting you to have your email set up to work for their email is... unreasonable.

Dunno, this thread really puts words in people's mouths.

TFA is about the fact that emails fall through the cracks and that following up is a good idea.

This can even happen to work emails, but I don't think any of the examples in the blog post are work related.

Whether the receiver has a catastrophic organization failure or whether it's a one-off accident doesn't seem relevant to me beyond couching some lectures in these threads to hypothetical people: in either case it is a better assumption to go "I should follow up" vs "there must be a reason they never got back to me, so I won't."

This is good advice beyond email. Dating is another place this comes up. It serves you better to politely follow up than to assume someone is avoiding you the second it may seem like it.

Meanwhile, "Oh, she got distracted and never responded?! Pfft, well she should get more organized if she wants to talk to me!" is kind of the vibes I get from this thread. While that's fine, to be clear, you may also be missing out if that is your default mode.

Back when professional communication consisted of memos and letters on paper, it was reasonable to expect a recipient to read most or all of them (even then, departmental/company-wide memos sometimes fell through the cracks) because it was much harder to physically produce and send an overwhelming volume to any one person and there was a real financial cost to doing it.

Email is fundamentally broken in the volume of messaging it allows at no costs. All inbox schemes, filters, auto-categories, etc. are just band-aids on the fundamental problem.

Charge the sender something close to a first-class postage stamp for each email sent, and you'll see email get productively useful.