Stop Microsoft users sending 'reactions' to email by adding a postfix header

[joelthelion]

In an outlook only company, reactions make a ton of sense. They save tons of "great, thank you " emails.

Of course you can still send real thank you emails when you're genuinely thankful!

[teeray]

I literally had to set up a “Congratulations / Congrats” filter to auto-delete those emails because they were so frequent and numerous when various accomplishments across the org were announced. The party popper emoji at least makes that far more tolerable.

[setopt]

I’m not an Outlook user, and I really dislike the product.

But I wish the feature that you can write say @joel to get someone’s attention in large email threads with too many on CC would have been adopted by more mail clients.

[xyst]

Apple added the same thing for iMessage/SMS. It worked as expected if the group message was all Apple users. But if you were the unfortunate person outside the ecosystem, you would get spammed with ‘{person} liked “{message}”’.

In some cases, people would react to the reaction leading to some ridiculous chains of text.

[stratocumulus0]

I remember seeing that some people in the corporate world put a capital J instead of a dot in some sentences. I first brushed this off as some artificial corporate level of politeness that's not too forward (the hook of a J does indeed look like a smiling face). Turns out that 4xA, the value of J in ASCII, is occupied by a smiley face in Wingdings. I still struggle to get it how did the Outlook email client know which characters to convert in the UI.

[easton]

Apparently it was the <font> tag in the emails (guess it had to be a HTML email): https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...

[NoPicklez]

So funny, my mother would send me emails from work and I would see J every now and then. First letter of my first name is J so I kept thinking she was just referring to me but she was sending a smiley face

[bitwize]

The conversion from emoticons to wingding J's occurred at the server level. I've sent emails in Mutt through an exchange server that, when quoted back to me, had the ASCII smileys converted to J's.

Exchange converts all emails that go through it to HTML; it's wrapping the J in <font> tags to select Wingdings. Some Exchange installations do not provide plain-text copies of emails sent through them.

[lilyball]

Perhaps the emails have both html and plain text representations, and you've configured your client to only show the plain text version?

[vishnugupta]

Haha I too was confused about this J character for a long time and took it for some corporate thing when I first started out on a full time corporate job.

Took me years until I got a windows laptop and saw emails in outlook.

[snapcaster]

Can an anti-reaction person explain what they find so distasteful about them? Is it that the other person wasn't willing to make the effort to type is seen as disrespectful? struggling to see what the problem is

[p51-remorse]

I kind of get why we don’t like this in email, but for SMS and Slack I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reactions. They’re a way to say “I received this and have a positive reaction to it, with no further communication necessary”.

Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”. And then getting a notification from the other party acknowledging my acknowledgment… yuck.

[Hnrobert42]

My friend interned at the FAA 20 years ago. He said the norm there was to write "Concur without comment." I thought that was brilliant. Of course, when I use it in conversation, no one gets my reference and thinks I am weird. But that is going to happen anyway.

[utensil4778]

It should be entirely socially acceptable to respond to any trivial message with "ACKNOWLEDGED" á la Picard

[signal11]

Gmail now has emoji reactions too. Eg see the smiley face here: https://imgur.com/a/0cYSLMQ

They launched it last year[1].

[1] https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-emoji-reactions/

[JohnFen]

I agree. I'm not anti-reactions. I'm anti-reactions in email.

[santoshalper]

I don't even mind reactions to email inside a corp network where it can be handled gracefully, but sending an email like that outside onto the public internet is absurd.

[morder]

I would love to disable that on my client. I never want to see reactions.

[OptionOfT]

I don't like it in Slack as it gives another avenue for out of sequence communication.

When we think about email is that it is really explicit when there is something new to handle. There is a new email.

In Slack there are many channels with individual messages which can have reactions, and those individual messages can turn into threads which provides another place where you now need to actively scan to see if something is relevant to you.

This in general is something that bothers me with group communication that is non-linear. It's extremely hard to keep track of it all, and to catch up. Where do you start reading?

When we talk about email, it's much easier to filter for what is important. If your name is in 'To' or in 'CC' it's important enough.

Sidenote: the company I worked at encouraged people to put the group they're emailing into BCC, which makes discoverability as to which group the email was sent (and thus which group I am a member of) impossible to find out, as that information is purposefully hidden from me. But I digress.

In general I am a huge fan of purposeful communication, i.e. tagging someone when it's for them, vs throwing something out there and see who picks up on it or not.

Not to mention that I've seen cases where people get angry for you not having caught a message on Slack. If I wasn't tagged I might miss it. That's the reality of things if you're in so many channels.

Not to mention that leaving channels was frowned upon, as it is explicitly printed.

[cmg]

Even in messenger-type apps there's a weird setup. With iMessage, if you're in a group chat with yourself and other people (B and C): if C sends a message and B reacts to it, you still get a message about B's reaction to C. Drives me crazy in certain group chats I'm in.

Signal, for some reason, notifies of reactions to your message on desktop but not on mobile (at least iOS).

[reaperducer]

Replaces a lot of useless typing I had to do to sound polite when saying “fine, no further comment”.

We've had macros on computers since at least the 1980's. Just pick your standard acknowledgement and bind it to a hotkey, or a text expansion.

On macOS: Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements…

[davemosk]

This solution breaks DKIM - it inserts new postfix headers. You can do the same thing in Thunderbird by going into the config editor and adding your own "x-ms-reactions: disallow" headers as per https://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers

[nickdothutton]

Every day a new form of cancer.

[ryandrake]

It's truly exhausting how often I read a tech article and think, "Just when you think software couldn't get worse..."

[AzzyHN]

Reactions make sense in a chat app, like MS Teams, Slack, or really anything that looks like an IRC room.

Dunno why Microsoft decided to add the option to Outlook.

[lupusreal]

Using reactions in chat apps is popular but I've never seen it have any practical purpose. I think the reason Microsoft added it to Outlook is obvious though, because it's popular in chat apps so somebody at Microsoft decided their old boring thing should have the popular new thing, because that would be good for their career.

[skrebbel]

To be frank I quite like this idea. Can’t we standardize it somehow and add it to other email clients too? IMO the fallback, that internally it’s just a regular, human-readable email, is quite neat (though I wonder how they dealt with other languages than English - do they know which language the email is in? Is it just always English? That’d be bad).

I work on a chat component library (https://talkjs.com) and we support both emoji reactions and email notifications for missed chat messages. These emails can be replied to and they show up as chat messages in the conversation. It’d be very natural for us to add reaction support to the emails too, but I’d be reluctant to do so if it means a great UX for Outlook users but a terrible UX (overload of little reaction emails) for the rest.

[wiktor-k]

> To be frank I quite like this idea. Can’t we standardize it somehow and add it to other email clients too?

Just copying what I said in the other thread: there actually is a standard for that already: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9078

Sadly, it seems it doesn't have broad adoption: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1724363

[orthoxerox]

Reminds me of Microsoft Comic Chat, which used to mangle IRC messages to pass additional metadata.

[JohnFen]

Oh, this is good to know! I haven't encountered this issue personally yet, but maybe once I've updated my mailserver, I won't encounter it in the future.

Now to figure out how to stop the same thing happening in SMS.

[cogthrow]

You'll be glad to hear that SMS already doesn't have reactions

[resonanttoe]

Years ago MS decided to exploit IRC a very similar way by producing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat - IRC networks and Channel operators hated this shit. It would add a tonne of extra encoding characters that weren't hidden in normal IRC clients.

All of this was because they wanted the critical mass of users and didn't want to work at establishing it themselves at the time.

(The funny part of it being that on the larger channels and networks, Comic chat was completely incapable of handling reasonably the large amount of chat volume in a channel)

Feels very similar where MS' entire philosophy is, if it works for us, we don't care if we spam non-MS people relentlessly.

Course it doesn't work that way, Sys-admins just end up banning/filtering or doing other work arounds to prune it.

[davidgerard]

at least it gave us Jerkcity

[megous]

The reaction email doesn't have some specific header that can be used to block it?

[Arnavion]

I just tested with an Exchange domain and nope, the reaction email has only standard headers and a bunch of x-ms- headers that are the same as for a regular email from that domain. In particular, it has an `x-ms-publictraffictype: Email` header that regular emails also have, and the envelope content-type and inner content-types are also identical (`multipart/alternative` and `text/plain; charset="us-ascii"` / `text/html; charset="us-ascii"` respectively).

[projektfu]

The UX problem is you send an e-mail, and someone "thumbs up" a response, and then you block the response and assume that they didn't care to respond, while they think they have responded.

[ppbjj]

That would be a pretty suboptimal user experience for both parties, don't you think?

[mrgoldenbrown]

It was annoying when Apple did this with SMS. I haven't seen it yet in my workplace, maybe our admins found a way to turn it off?

[bitwize]

"Or you can use a mail client from this century." --the IT guy from my former job

[Hamuko]

Is that what I'm supposed to tell to all those Outlook users?

[ffhhj]

Microsoft have made several oopsies in the past ignoring opt-outs, i.e. OneDrive.

[RedShift1]

I haven't seen this type of messages. Where is it coming from?

[munchler]

Microsoft Outlook.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/reactions-in-micr...

[kazinator]

Or, you know, you could just turf all e-mails with those "reacted to your message" Subject: headers, and not use any MS specific headers in what you send.

This reaction thing seems like a gift from Microsoft to spammers. E-mail recipients have a "like" button that instantly generates a reply, validating that the e-mail address is staffed.