2009/11/7 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net:
Could you explain why you think ignoring emails doesn't work? It works perfectly well for me.
People are scared because they experience an emotional response to the tone and content of the messages. Ignoring the message (that is, doing nothing after you've read it) is not a solution to that problem. The implicit rejoinder you're giving them is, "Don't have emotions." That doesn't work, because people are human.
That's not ignoring, that's reading. Ignoring the message means not reading it. You look at the subject line, you see that it is part of a thread you are either not interested in or have lost interest in and you don't read it. (You can delete it if you want, personally I just leave it sitting in my gmail inbox - I currently have 9992 conversations with unread emails in them in my inbox, they just sit there forever doing nothing. They do no harm if I never click on them.)
You are describing a different problem to the one we are suggesting should be solved by ignoring emails. Ignoring emails solves the problem of not everyone being interested in every email. The tone and contents of emails are a different problem entirely and I haven't suggested solving it by ignoring emails. What the solution is depends on the kind of emails you are talking about. In some cases, it is just people being too sensitive and they need to learn not to take offence so easily. In other cases, it is people saying things that are unacceptable, in which case the list moderators should step in with a warning and pre-moderating their emails for persistent offenders.