in criticism of Microsoft Outlook Reactions

Once or twice a week, I get a “Reaction Daily Digest” in my work email account catching me up on some of the emoji-style reactions I’ve received to recent emails that I’ve recently missed. I hate these emails for enough reasons that I’m taking a break from clearing my morning email to write a post about this.

email shouldn’t have emoji reactions

This isn’t a criticism of emoji or emoji reactions. As I’ve been increasing my use of Signal over the past week or so, I’ve been pleased that it supports emoji reactions and that it allows a wide range of them instead of locking you into a select few. However, one of the (few) great things about email is that it’s pretty much an open, cross-platform means of communication, and adding emoji reactions to Outlook email in a way that isn’t accounted for in the protocols that email is built on just feels dumb. It’s even more annoying than seeing phones trying to account for iOS and Android’s differing approaches to emoji reactions in a mixed group chat. Emoji reactions are great, but they don’t belong in email.

I’m being punished for using an(other) email client

I’m a big believer in using an email client (rather than a web interface), and I also believe in using a single client for all of the email accounts that I keep an eye on (seven, but some of them more than others). I assume that if I used Outlook (as either a web interface or a standalone client), I would get near instantaneous updates when people used emoji reactions on my messages rather than getting digest emails the next morning. I don’t want to use Outlook, though—I want to use my email client for email accounts on at least three different platforms. If Outlook email is a good email product, I shouldn’t be forced into using Outlook’s client to take advantage of all of its features.

I’m being punished for valuing privacy

This is one that really drives me nuts. Within my email client, I disable remote content as an extra privacy measure; I don’t feel any particular need to let organizations and companies learn more about me because I’m loading images from their servers. Guess what? The emojis that people react to my emails with are displayed in the digest email as remote images (rather than, presumably, the raw Unicode emoji that my system could display on its own), so I can’t even see how people are reacting to my messages without suspending my privacy protections.

conclusion

All of this is dumb. I hate that Outlook has introduced this feature, and I worry about what it might say about future platformization of emails.

• Microsoft
• Outlook
• emoji
• Signal
• iOS
• Android