> Forgive me, but the problem isn't the source.

I said that somewhat facetiously, purposely adding a ";P". I mean, to the extent to which I believe the problem is the source, it is that I am living in a culture that seems to require people to say "thank you" in order to not 1) feel ungrateful or 2) make the other person think you are ungrateful. That either of the players believes that that "thank you" is required (to the extent that people seriously say things like "thanks in advance" if they feel that a reply later will be difficult... that's just bullshit ;P) does seem like a problem, but as I live in a culture that does this, I play by those rules.

The one concession I make to my reality is that I tend to go out of my way to make certain that when I say "thank you", you feel thanked: I don't just say it as a trite addition to a conversation, I make it clear and emphasized, and I try to get eye contact; if at all appropriate (such as dealing with a customer support person) I make it clear why I thanked the person in order to underscore just how much effort I'm putting into it over what some people who say "thanks".

I will then point out both that I had said "even still, though, I usually can't really fault the sender" and how I went to great lengths to describe my attempts to solve these problems indirectly by 1) adding better filtering, 2) working on technical solutions that better allow outsourcing the problem of e-mail ingress triage, and 3) figuring out ways to avoid the thank you from happening in the first place (such as avoiding solving a problem in a way that causes them to get an e-mail).

> Sure, technology might offer some solutions, but if it's to the point that you resent expressions of gratitude from your users, you're losing the ability to empathize with them and that begins to be dangerous from many perspectives.

I like to presume that every user I've helped is grateful (unless of course they send me back a nastygram in response). To assume otherwise and to only get that feeling if they send you a "thank you" seems like an overly negative way to live life. I mean, its nice to get the occasional "thank you" (especially from someone who put a lot of thought into it), but if it's to the point where to "empathize with people" (seriously?) and to feel you've helped them you need to obtain silly expressions of it, there's probably something horrible that has gone wrong.

> Further, honestly, you lose something more when you avoid and/or lose that customer contact and that perception of responsiveness from a real person – people like immediate, self-service options, but they also value knowing there's a responsive human out there, ready to fix whatever imaginable problem they may face. That sort of thing wins and retains customers, users, etc.

So, to verify: you think that a user who sends an e-mail to someone's personal e-mail account in English (or Chinese, or whatever) in long-form asking for a refund, who then receives that refund, is going to assume that a computer took care of that issue, instead of a human? That just doesn't make any sense to me at all... I would find it much more believable if you told me that a non-negligible number of people using an actual self-service option (a term you seem to be mis-applying) believed there was a human who processed all of the requests (a statistic that may even be true).

> As a final point, I just reject the idea that the time and cognitive load from one (or even a dozen) thank-you emails is equal to the time required for a question or bug report, so I doubt the gravity of the problem to begin with and maintain that there's more afoot here than simply over-demand for constrained resources.

I can only assume that I'm trying to run a company with many more users than you on margins much lower than you (assuming you are running a company at all, which is not clear). I would easily receive many hundreds per day of varyingly complex versions of "thanks" if I sent a "Done. -J" to every issue I fixed. Even doing what I can to avoid sending e-mail, I still send out hundreds of e-mail messages.

In reality, the time it takes to solve a user's problem is usually a tiny fraction of the amount of time it takes to read their e-mail to figure out what they want me to do: it is figuring out what they want to do from long-form English that takes so much time, and just because the e-mail starts with "thanks!" doesn't mean that somewhere in there isn't another issue. (Hence why I feel the real technical problem is to better automate that, something I had a lot of time to make a lot of progress on about half a year ago during a major activity lull.)