Should a recently found cache of errant emails go unanswered?

Are you obligated to respond to an email sent months ago that you inadvertently overlooked?

By my most recent count, I believe I have seven different email addresses. I had a reason for setting up each of these emails. One was for personal use. Another is my work email. Early on, I created a separate email from which to receive email from readers of The Right Thing column. One I have because it came with the url I purchased years ago when I set up www.jeffreyseglin.com. Yet another address doesn’t receive email but is simply an address where all email gets forwarded to wherever I’d like to be forwarded.

All of these seemed like a good idea at the time as a way to keep email correspondence related to various aspects of my personal and professional life separate. But it quickly became burdensome to check on each regularly, so I began having each of them forwarded to the one primary email address I use most often.

I have friends and colleagues who continue to use a separate personal email and professional email to try to ensure their personal emails are kept private from their employers. That seems a good practice. But I don’t do that.

Every time you or anyone else emails me, it all ends up on the same place, or at least it should. I recently discovered that the forwarding service for one of those email accounts had failed to function. It was an email I used to use for reader email to the column years ago, but apparently some publications that carry the column still feature it. I learned about the malfunction after the email provider sent an email to one of my other email addresses to let me know that the account had been inactive and would be suspended if I didn’t log into it. When I did log in, I discovered hundreds of emails that I had never seen, some of which were from readers of the column responding to my request to tell me their stories of kindness…and there were many stories of kindness.

One option would be to reset the forwarding service and ignore the pile of emails I hadn’t seen. If readers didn’t hear back from me, they might assume I chose not to use their stories, that I was overwhelmed by reader email and didn’t respond, or that I was simply rude. But pretending those emails never arrived seemed lazy at best and dishonest at worst.

Instead, I am making my way through the emails – each of them – and trying to respond where possible. I do try to respond to readers when they write, even when they disagree with something, and this should not be an exception to that practice.

While responding to email is not treated by many as urgently as it once might have been, if I ask someone for something in an email and they have the grace to respond, the right thing seems to be to acknowledge their response.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go check the other six email accounts to make sure everything is working fine and I’m as up to date as possible. You can email at jeffreyseglin@gmail.com with your questions, conundrums, or stories, and I will continue to try to respond.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.