how long for a reply

[breezer]

just a question.

If you email some one a question, or request information, how long would you consider it to be reasonable to expect to recieve a reply

 

[HandyHands]

All depends on how busy people are, the time of day the question was posted, and the day of the week. I guess most people on here visit daily either to scan new posts (like me), or review just the sections they are interested in.

So if you post a question in the morning, it should receive a response by the end of the day. If you post a question in the evening, it may receive a response within hours, or it could be 24hrs - the next evening. It could take longer over a weekend - people do have lifes off the forum.

Have to say it does make me laugh when a question is posted, and then an hour later they are re-posting asking if anyone is bothering to read/answer the question - as though they expect people to be sat waiting for questions to be submitted.

 

[breezer]

nice comments, and i agree, especialy when there is a wiki, and sticky posts which do answer a lot of questions, but i did say email

 

[WoodYouLike]

Depend on so many things I guess.
Emails to a business should IMHO be answered a.s.a.p (during normal business hours I would say within 1 -2 hours at least). The best way is (like some garden company I know of) when you're out and about and can only access your emails early mornings and late afternoon/evening is to put an auto-reply in place stating the email is received and will be answered as soon as someone is available, simple courtesy.

Personal emails, depends when someone reads his/her email and wants to reply or not.

 

[HandyHands]

Sorry breezer - misread your question.

Guess it also depends on whether the business is a "one man band", or has a full compliment of admin staff that are paid to answer emails/phones. If the latter, I'd agree with 1-2 hours. If the former, then an auto-reply is certainly the way to do it.

 

[gas4you]

As a 'one man band' I usually answer e-mails the same evening although I must admit that occasionally my anti spam shifts them into the spam folder and if I'm tired or busy I forget to check that

 

[JohnD]

I think easy Qs most often get answered within half a day; longer ones are going to be put aside, and if not resolved within a week, have probably been forgotten.

If you're dealing with a company with office staff, they may have been given a workstack that your mail falls into, and many managers like to keep their work/staff ratios somewhat overloaded as they don't like to think of their staff having work gaps and sitting around doing nothing. Such a workstack is likely to be sorted by age and priority, and some probs can languish indefinitely if there is always something more urgent coming in. Sadly, in such organisations, the employee who puts in a real effort and clears his workstack is likely to be "rewarded" by being given even more work to do until he reaches the state of being unable to cope with it all.