Oct 8, 2026, 2:14 PMEncountered someone who does what I'm calling "outbound-only email".
They email me. I ask a clarifying question. No answer.
After a while, a separate email (new subject line) arrives with some additional information, generally unrelated to my question. This repeats for a while.
It is then assumed that I have the info I need.
No idea how to engage with this behaviour pattern.
@tomw Have they ever replied to one of your emails? An aggressively optimistic answer might be that they're not receiving literally anything that you send them.
I had this with one part of the NHS for a while, whose email server had apparently decided that my self-run server wasn't important enough to be real and so it didn't actually deliver anything I sent to it. It took a very long time to get hold of somebody who understood that problem description, after which it was quite swiftly resolved, presumably either by turning down the level of stroppiness a little at the filter, or just white-listing me somewhere.
Oct 9, 2026, 12:26 PM@denny Sadly I have confirmed that they do receive my emails. But I have wondered!