Communication experts from around the world have come to an agreement that marking an email as urgent is essentially pointless. The conclusion was reached at a recent international teleconference, known as Commfest, hosted in Tokyo and attended online by professionals from all over the globe.
In most email applications you can flag an email as being urgent or important by clicking on the exclamation point button. This supposedly makes the email stand out from the others and let the reader know it is much more important than the multitude of other emails they receive each day.
However, surveys of people from a variety of industries, in addition to a pile of anecdotal evidence, suggest that only a very small percentage of recipients actually pay attention to the exclamation mark. Interestingly, the percentage was quite similar to the proportion of people who still insist on clicking the exclamation mark before sending their supposedly important email.
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