Nightmare Email Feature
Nightmare Email Feature
[A panel with a short email message, with the first line partly obscured by the top of the panel. Below that, in light gray font, is an information message from the email client.] Enjoyed it! I'm busy this weekend, but let me know if you're free sometime next week and want to get dinner or something.
Total time spent revising this email before sending: 47 minutes 12 seconds ...
[Caption below the panel:] My nightmare email feature

Most modern email clients provide tools to help their users read, write, and keep track of email efficiently. For instance, the user may receive a notification if the email body contains wording that suggests a file has been attached, but there is no actual attachment, in order to prevent them forgetting to include the intended file in the email.
This comic suggests a similar feature, one which would inform not the user, but the recipient of the message, how long the email has been revised before being sent. This is an expansion of a common feature of collaboration tools used by law firms, and modern word processors such as Microsoft Word 2016. Randall calls this his nightmare email feature, implying he spends too much time in revision of what should be simple email messages and that making himself - or worse, the recipient - aware of the actual time would make him anxious.
In the case shown it seems that the sender and recipient of the e-mail had recently met, and the recipient suggested meeting again this weekend. It then took 47 minutes to write a short reply in which the sender ends up saying only that they enjoyed the thing referred to, but, alas, they have no time this weekend, and then lets the other suggest a possible time for a dinner... or something. Of course there could be more to the email above the panel, but it seems to be a very short answer to another e-mail, and it increases the nightmare for the writer (and the impact of the joke) if this was all that was written in 47 minutes.
If the text had been written out in less than 2 minutes, it would not have been a problem, but it seems the writer of this e-mail had to think a lot about how it was phrased. This could lead the recipient to wonder what took so long. Was it that they did not enjoy it, but ended up writing this to be nice? They only write that they are busy this weekend, thus not giving any reason as to why, and the last part allows them the possibility of also being "busy" on whatever time is suggested for dinner. Also, "or something" is very non-committal. Alternatively it could be the opposite, for a case where the writer enjoyed the time a lot, and is really looking forward to another meeting, but tries to seem relaxed and open minded, to not scare the other person away. All of this would also be true if it had been written in 2 minutes, but then at least there would have been the excuse of not having spent a lot of time thinking about how the reply was phrased.
The title text describes a similarly uncomfortable feature, which would inform the recipient how long a message has been sitting in the user's drafts folder, thus highlighting their procrastination, as well as demonstrating that "(...)didn't see your message until just now" is a lie, or at least it was only true when the original message was written, and now three days later another message should have been written instead. This feature would also be able to catch anyone who tries to avoid the feature depicted in the comic by saving the email in "drafts" while making revisions outside the mailing software, either mentally or in another word processing program.
Randall has explored a related anxiety-inducing feature of instant messaging in 1886: Typing Notifications .
Applying the feature in the comic to this explanation: it sat incomplete in this wiki for approximately 2 months and 26 days (since the comic's creation), before an unregistered user removed its incomplete tag.
[A panel with a short email message, with the first line partly obscured by the top of the panel. Below that, in light gray font, is an information message from the email client.] Enjoyed it! I'm busy this weekend, but let me know if you're free sometime next week and want to get dinner or something.
Total time spent revising this email before sending: 47 minutes 12 seconds ...
[Caption below the panel:] My nightmare email feature
