There is also a C guide [1] which has a pretty interesting email policy...
I’m generally available to help out with email questions so feel free to write in, but I can’t guarantee a response.
I lead a pretty busy life and there are times when I just can’t answer a question you have.
When that’s the case, I usually just delete the message. It’s nothing personal;
I just won’t ever have the time to give the detailed answer you require. [...]
I had a work colleague with a similarly refreshing Out-Of-Office E-mail autoresponder that included something like: "I'm on vacation. When I get back I'm not going to have time to read all my missed E-mails. So your mail is going to be ignored and deleted with the other 2,000 unread mails. If it's important, E-mail me again after I return on [date]."
Here's a product (Gmail/Outlook add-on or so): have your own LLM trained over your public texts (articles, books, blog entries, READMEs, Hacker News comments, and so on), mark the emails you can't respond to with the "GPT" label which puts the mail in a queue and if you don't remove the label in 7 days or so, it sends a response with a polite intro "I didn't have the time to get to your email, but here's what I might think as a response".
Good thing that with the coming devastating job purges due to statistical learning such "careers" based around bullshit jobs [1] where some words in a generated email can be "career-terminating" will be forever gone.
I think I'd argue that the people whose emails can be sufficiently answered with an LLM are the ones whose jobs are first on the chopping block, so the product has a self-destructing user base.
Not necessarily. When I was writing the initial comment I wasn't even thinking about job-related mails, but at someone like Sean Carroll who does a regular Ask me Anything [1] where lots of questions are skipped for lack of time, or in general academics who receive plenty of emails about articles and various field-related questions.
I can speak from experience that posting that type of material will generate some interesting email inquiries. I used to get email messages with a 4000-line program, multiple datasets, and "My program doesn't work. Can you tell me what the error is?" The awkwardness of deleting the message is less than the awkwardness of refusing what someone else views as a 30-second request.
When you know you definitly do not have time for an answer deleting it might unload your mental burden. Keeping hundreds of unamswered messages around might feel like an unresolved issue.
There's no functional difference between "not looking at it ever again" and "deleting it".
You should understand when they say "delete" that they mean "remove from their queue", whether it still exists in an "archive" folder, backups, trash, ... is irrelevant.
