You’re not alone, when I see a message marked ‘high importance’ I usually respond by treating it as less important (because 99% of the time, it’s about someone trying to make themselves feel more important). As a demonstration, the most common ‘high importance’ messages that I receive are about staff training courses. Far from being ‘important’, it’s unusual for me to open these message before sending them to the recycle bin. In contrast, genuinely important emails (i.e. the ones that you have to reply to within a few minutes) are rarely marked important – because the author had too little time to faff about changing the importance settings.

I has never had a purpose, although that doesn’t stop people trying. I ignore it and (skim) read all my emails and decide for myself. In order for it to work, of course, would require all people who use it to be competent…

emuse
v. trans: to make people laugh at Rod Hull against their better judgement.

Interesting comments (particularly interested in this new word “emuse”). David, does your company actually have a policy in place re importance or otherwise? Bearing in mind that people seem to struggle with even arranging appointments using Outlook, I’d be amazed if they follow a company policy on marking emails of High importance (or low importance).

Flicking through my own emails, I’ve come to realise that most people use it if the email requires a quick response. It doesn’t mean it’s WORTH responding to, but if it was, it’d need to be done quickly (if you get my drift). Perhaps they should ditch the concept of importance and replace it with a sort of best before date feature?

I’ve found that the best way to get someone to read your email first is to use the ‘low importance’ tag. Nine times out of ten, people are intrigued by the little blue arrow and open your message to see what it is!

Here we examine the gap between “Important to sender” and “important to recipient”. Possibly the nastiest trick is SMTP intermediaries that strip these flags out, and lots do – generally the importace flag is set by people displaying faint signals of numptyness, and they imagine you’re going to get what they sent. Numpties, of course, tend towards ballistic reactions when their tick doesn’t turninto your pling.

As it were.

There was an absolutely stunning bit of work done over in the Lotus Notes parallel universe, on a thing called the “Bifrost mail manager”. it was a giant customisation of the end-user mailbox and went round doing Bayesian stuff all the tim eon the stream of incoming mail. Unfortunately, IBM went through a period of snaffling lots of these developments and rebuilding them into the next release, which made people take them offline… more’s the pity.