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Does Email Destroy Good Manners


windrush

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Does Email destroy good manners or does it have its own rules?

Am I the only one fed up with having my Emails ignored or is this endemic?

I ask this question because during the last month or so I have sent Emails to a number of local cachers asking for GENERAL advice about their caches.

In every case I have been ignored, this, I believe is ignorant behaviour. If cachers don't want to help perhaps they could say so on their cache page, or have the courtesy to say it is not their policy to help when asked. :D:o:P:laughing:

Does anyone else have experience of this?

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Could also be that they are no longer active, which you can check or maybe they have changed their email accounts. Many people do that to save money on a internet provider and such. I emailed a very active cacher in my area and have gotten no response for a week. I looked on her profile and she hasn't logged in either. I am assuming that she is on vacation! You might have your email intercepted by email accounts as spam if you have a yahoo or hotmail account. It also depends on where they recieve their mail. I often get labled as "possible spam". Did you try putting something very specific in your subject like "geocaching question"? Did you go through the geocaching web site web site? Maybe they get so many mails from geocaching that they don't check them all or their eyes start to glaze over. I have been trying to get a hold of one person about his virtual cache, I would like permission to log it since I was there. I posted a note on his cache, hopefully he will get it.

Good luck!

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A lot of people have been having trouble receiving GC.com emails (especially some of us on AOL) so it may not be that they are ignoring you, but just haven't received the emails. Lately, I've been receiving emails up to 1 week after they were actually sent.

Maybe they are out of town for end of the summer trips, too.

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I don't think its a lack of manners to ignore communication attempts from total strangers. Would you call a total stranger, or ring their doorbell? E-mail really is no different.

 

But the e-mail comes wrapped by GC.com, therefore it's not a total stranger. It's as if we all have a secret knock and the OP did the secret knock and was still ignored (if that's the case, the strange and wonderful internets has a way of confounding whether your "knock" on the door ever even reached them).

 

I'd like to think that the majority of us are in it for some sense of community as well as finding tupperware in the woods.

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Does Email destroy good manners or does it have its own rules?

Am I the only one fed up with having my Emails ignored or is this endemic?

I ask this question because during the last month or so I have sent Emails to a number of local cachers asking for GENERAL advice about their caches.

In every case I have been ignored, this, I believe is ignorant behaviour. If cachers don't want to help perhaps they could say so on their cache page, or have the courtesy to say it is not their policy to help when asked. :laughing::laughing::anicute::anibad:

Does anyone else have experience of this?

Its possiable that the cacher no longer is watching their email or that it just doesn't work any longer (unvalidated?), or its getting stuck along the way in a spam filter or something.

Its also possiable that they are getting your email but choose not to respond for some reason. I once got an email asking for help in finding a cache from a person I'd never seen in any logbooks, and they had no online logged finds and had not logged a DNF on the cache. I couldn't decide if the person was serious or if they were pirates?? fishing or what, so I just deleted the message.

And there have been several over the years that are like 'I can't find your cache can you give me a hint? is it in a log or a tree stump??'.... without telling me what cache name/ID they're looking for. If they've DNFed recently maybe I'll have seen that and know, but otherwise there's no telling what cache they need help with. If I'm in a good mood I'll respond and tell them they need to specify exactly what cache they need help with. If I'm not in a good mood, I just delete the message. I think its somewhat rude to just email someone out of the blue with a question or comment without making reference to what its about. You can waste a lot of time trying to puzzle out what the world they're talking about... :blink:

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And there have been several over the years that are like 'I can't find your cache can you give me a hint? is it in a log or a tree stump??'.... without telling me what cache name/ID they're looking for. If they've DNFed recently maybe I'll have seen that and know, but otherwise there's no telling what cache they need help with. .... I think its somewhat rude to just email someone out of the blue with a question or comment without making reference to what its about. You can waste a lot of time trying to puzzle out what the world they're talking about.

 

AMEN

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I've emailed a few people about caches and have thanfully always gotten a response. Sometimes it was a little slow because it is summer and a lot of people are busy with kids out of school or on vacation. I'm totally cool with that because I appreciate them taking the time to help me at all.

 

I'll have to 3rd what Nobby said. A couple of times I notified people via thier profile and I forgot to mention what cache I was asking about. Boy did I feel like a goob but they were still nice enough to respond so I could clarify. When I do contact other cachers I really go out of my way to be as polite and concise as possible.

Edited by IGJoe
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I can't imagine Miss Manners would bash us for not answering unsolicited inquiries. I feel no obligation to open my door to strangers, talk with people who phone me at random, or reply to unsolicited letters or e-mails. That's the chance you take when you contact strangers.

 

Now if you knew these cachers personally and established some type of relationship beyond a casual "how ya doin'" at an event, then it might be a different story.

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I can't imagine Miss Manners would bash us for not answering unsolicited inquiries. I feel no obligation to open my door to strangers, talk with people who phone me at random, or reply to unsolicited letters or e-mails. That's the chance you take when you contact strangers.

 

Now if you knew these cachers personally and established some type of relationship beyond a casual "how ya doin'" at an event, then it might be a different story.

 

Assuming the e-mail is sent through the GC.com website forwarder and that it was polite and detailed on what was being asked about one of your caches...in other words perfect in every way except that it came from a "stranger" (via GC.com)...

 

Would you open it and/or answer it?

 

I mean, you put the cache out there with the intention of interacting with other people through your cache, cache page, log book, etc. Now, someone is asking you a question concerning said cache via your profile (which they found as a result of your cache page) and you want to act like geocachers are total strangers to you?

 

It'd be one thing if I just mailed insertrandomnamehere@hotmail.com and expected any kind of a response, but this hobby is built on community and community members should feel a modicum of social responsibilities to each other. It's not a rule, but I'd like to think that most good community members see it as an obligation to the other members.

 

The answer doesn't even need to be what the OP is looking for. If he wants a hint, you could tell him "you don't give hints, but good luck" and you'd fulfill that obligation to the community. Ignoring another geocacher's e-mail is rude and counterproductive to the roots of this hobby (from a general standpoint, I'm not saying this is what the OP is dealing with specifically since we can't rule out technical problems, etc).

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Luckily I have had good luck contacting other cachers about caches, or questions about areas, hints, other things to see or do etc.

However, when it comes to contacting someone that is holding a Travel Bug - that is a completely different story and I get the cold shoulder more often than not.

GEO.JOE

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Considering the responses of the 99.9% cachers I've contacted via email, it only proves what a great community have.

 

Failure to respond is usually because they have lost interest in maintaining their caches or bugs. (And normally why they needed to be contacted in the first place)

 

Now why they aren't responding to your queries I have no idea.

 

If you'd like to post your questions, I love to talk turkey about finding caches. On line or a PM is fine by me. Of course you could always do better by picking another cacher for advice. Trust me on that one. :laughing:

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I don't think its a lack of manners to ignore communication attempts from total strangers. Would you call a total stranger, or ring their doorbell? E-mail really is no different.

 

But the e-mail comes wrapped by GC.com, therefore it's not a total stranger. It's as if we all have a secret knock and the OP did the secret knock and was still ignored (if that's the case, the strange and wonderful internets has a way of confounding whether your "knock" on the door ever even reached them).

 

I'd like to think that the majority of us are in it for some sense of community as well as finding tupperware in the woods.

 

I agree that most of use are in this, in part, for the sense of community. Some however aren't and prefer to be left alone.

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