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Comment by jesterson | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it's just me, but I find those follow-up extremely annoying and if I'm getting at least one, that guarantees blocking of recipient.

We live in high turnover of information, and if I received your first email (which I did) and didn't respond, it does mean I am not interested. Sending a follow up would just spark frustration.

Again, perhaps it's just me and this approach works for most people, but it may be useful to know it does not for all.

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I guess the problem here is the ambiguity of not responding -- it could mean you're not interested, but it could also mean you are too busy to reply. Without additional information, the salesman doesn't know which case it is.

From his perspective though, he doesn't lose anything by sending the follow up, and if it is the second case, may gain a sale.

There is no ambiguity in non-responding - if I am not responding, the subject is of no interest to me. That's pretty simple thing to understand.

Of course it doesn't work for non organised individuals and people who succumb under pressure.

Email providers in general, and GMail in particular, is not as sophisticated as we like to believe. There have been so many instances where people I have been talking to for several years get randomly thrown into the spam folder.

It goes without saying that some of my outreaches get thrown there too by default.

So, as the sender, I don't really know if you saw the message and didn't want it, or if you were too busy to reply, or that you did not receive my message in the first place.

There are, of course, many email tracking tools available. I do not use them though.

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