A look at email response time, age and gender a factor
Have you ever been waiting on an email response – and waiting and waiting?
Turns out, email response times vary by the sender’s age, whether the answer is tapped into a smartphone or a desktop computer, and how much email is clogging the sender’s inbox.
Yahoo Labs measured 16 billion emails exchanged and found the median times for teens to respond was 13 minutes and for those 51 and older it was 47 minutes. The medians for young adults and adults fell somewhere in between, with those 20 to 35 answering in 16 minutes and those 36 to 50 replying in 24 minutes.
The researchers found that most replies were quick: 90% occurred on the same day the email was received, and the most likely response time was within 2 minutes of receipt.
Users answered more emails as the number of messages in their inboxes increased, but in general, they didn’t keep up with the growing volume of mail and ended up answering a smaller fraction of the total.
That is where age differences kicked in.
“Young people and teens respond immediately and write very, very short messages,” said Kristina Lerman, a computer-science professor at USC and one of the study’s authors. “They seem to be insensitive to email load. They keep up.”
In a conversation with multiple exchanges, replies became quicker-until the last one, which was slower than all the others. Similarly, messages grew longer as an exchange progressed-until a final terse response. The unwritten message conveyed by that last, brief answer? We’re done here.
The difference between men and women wasn’t huge, but the researchers found you might have to wait about 4 minutes longer for a response from a woman.
And the device used for a reply affected both the speed and length of the response: Replies sent from phones were quickest, possibly because phones are often configured to alert users when emails arrive, and they were also the shortest.
The median reply time from a phone was 28 minutes with a median length of 20 words. From a tablet, the medians were 57 minutes and 27 words. And from a desktop, they were 62 minutes and 60 words.
