Hmm, I can't help but feel that one man's 'potential best practice' is another's blatent rudeness. I suppose accuracy is always welcome but I would not be happy if I found out someone was sitting on one of my emails for no real reason

I'll get back to you on that...once I have time to think about it.

I rather like the thought of being an email outlaw. Holstered up in leather chaps, and a big 45!.... I completely agree with Nick - nothing more annoying than a non response!

I'm going to side with David on this one. It's not a matter of purposely sitting on the response, it's about thinking before you shoot back, which we, myself included, do too often. Responsive is good, thoughtful response is better, and that doesn't always happen without a bit of reflection. And, sometimes picking up the phone, or getting the stakeholders together for a short meeting, can be far more effective (and efficient). While we're at it, we all need to think harder about who should get our reply. "Reply all" should be the exception, not the norm.

Not many years ago I built some email classifiers for a start-up (computer forensics and email analytics). Their first classifier (using their own email server) split email into business vs non-business ("personal"). Accuracy was up over 85%. One guy sent 95% "personal" and the company average was a bit over 50%. The most revealing finding was that the strongest predictor variable was "time of day" - business emails went out mainly just before lunch or CoB, personals were in the first half hour after arriving or after/during lunch. Another insight (and also useful predictor) was "style" using the Flesch/Kincaid simple metric. Most business emails fell in a very narrow style range (around grade 8 or 9). "Personals" were anything from 2 to 16. What did the CEO do about this alarming proportion of non-business emails? Basically nothing (except for a word to the addicted "95% man"). Although the volume of personal email was high, the time to compose or read them was very brief (we believed). It was better to get it out of the way and then on with work... Taking the immediacy out of the response may have meant half a day went into planning it. The "rudeness" Nick mentioned could also be a kind of nonchalant "hard to get" social interplay.