The recent research on the “best” time to send an email – it’s Sunday 3pm to 6pm if you are a monster who doesn’t care about anything except getting your message read – has just highlighted for me how awful email is all the time.
As a new French citizen, perhaps I should insist on my legal right to disconnect out of hours. Ideally, I’d like no work-related emails before 10am, between midday and 2pm, after 6pm, at weekends, on bank holidays and between 14 July and 1 September. That doesn’t happen in even the most enlightened workplaces, but nothing makes me feel more patriotic than emailing a French company in summer, getting an out-of-office that sends me to someone else, that person also being en vacances and suggesting a third, whose out-of-office directs me back to the first person.
I got out of the email habit during my recent, brief holiday and now every message makes my fingertips tingle and my stomach drop with anticipatory dread, even the ones from Nextdoor about the new bollard on Tadcaster Road. Gathering the nerve to check my inbox, I have taken to hissing Logan Roy-style expletive-heavy incantations in the hope of scaring the emails away. There should be a better method by now, but there isn’t; the only way I’d really welcome a message is by pigeon (it’s time the ones that eat my hens’ food started earning their keep).
The last email that truly sparked joy was a press release last year about a “lovestruck copperband butterfly fish” at Sea Life Manchester aquarium who had fallen in love with a plastic Peppa Pig. There was a good one from 2002 I rediscovered recently in which a trouble-seeking missile of a lawyer friend suggested to her macho, absolutely humourless project finance team that the office vending machines should dispense flower essence lozenges, not Snickers. “Evening primrose are my personal favourite and lead to a sunny disposition. You would be truly amazed by the healing power of flowers.”
But most of the intervening 20 years’ correspondence? Meh. Honestly, if you can’t bring me this quality of email, the best time to send me one is never.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
