Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, recently shared an anecdote about responding to an email six years later during his sabbatical. More and more, companies are using Slack and similar tools to reduce the number of emails.

Netiquette often considers it rude to take more than 24 hours to reply to an email. In fact, having some buffer makes us realize that many emails are not that urgent nor important.

If you receive an answer several months after you hit "send," there is even some kind of pleasure. Of course, you could have invented many interpretations of this silence in the buffer. But it can remind us of a not-so-distant past when we enjoyed receiving postcards in the middle of winter from friends we had met during the summer.

At least you got a reply.