target potential friends
Skuka's should i always respond to emails? presents these questions:
if i get an email that i dislike, a person is being disrespectful, or just unpleasant - should i still reply? i appreciate someone going through the trouble of sending me an email and want to make internet feel frendlier, on one hand. on another, i do not want to engage with that person. i don't really know.
should someone reply to an email sent to their blog, if they do not actually want to interact with the person?
Since email replies count as interactions, would you interact with someone you don't actually want to interact with after having thought it through? With how text message and chat conversations work asynchronously like email, would you approach the former modes any differently than the latter? It's not like you need to make a snap decision about accepting, rejecting, or missing someone's incoming phone call. Neither are we talking about ordinary professional contexts here. Those can comprise plenty of justified reasons to interact with someone you don't want to.
I suspect that securing wants like Skuka describes above is easier through people you want to interact with in the first place. Saving the reward of your attention for people reaching out in ways you like, find pleasant, and find respectful with replies sounds wise. The following line from Zachary's Why I email complete strangers rhymes with that:
Don’t contact someone unless you’d want to consider them a friend.
However, people do change over time for better or worse. Who knows whether someone will choose to contact you again, this time convincing you that a reply is warranted?
As impressive as always responding to emails can be, I'm sure many cultivators of a friendlier Internet leave at least some emails read or even unread. Other, more innocuous causes beyond the above exist: being too busy, having too many emails in their inbox to reasonably attend to, and otherwise. Like them, you may want to be careful not to spread yourself so thin that you can't tap into the critical friendships you want and maintain how you would like to. You're probably not looking to talk to everyone under the sun, but rather with those you vibe with via any particular aspect or combination thereof. How can targeting potential friends with your correspondence achieve that outcome for you?