Age, platform, timing plays important role in email response

A new study has revealed that a reply to an email depends on a variety of factors including age, platform, volume and timing.

According to the researchers at University of Southern California, 90 percent of people respond within a day or two of receiving an email to which they plan to respond.

The study stated that younger people reply faster, but write shorter replies. Teens were the quickest, with an email response time-an average of 13 minutes. Young adults aged 20-35 years responded on average of 16 minutes of receiving an email. 35-50 year olds tended to respond in 24 minutes, on average.

In addition, if someone is working from a laptop, on average it will take them almost twice as long to respond than if he or she were using a mobile phone.

The researchers found that when younger users become more overloaded they tend to send shorter and faster replies to cope with the increased load. However, older people respond to an increased load of emails by replying to a smaller fraction of emails.

They also found that people were more active on email during the day than at night and emails on weekends get shorter replies than weekdays.