What to Say Instead of ‘I Hope This Email Finds You Well’

Several decades and thousands of emails later, Naomi Baron can still pinpoint the moment she first encountered what has since become the cockroach of email openers—indestructible, omnipresent, and curiously devoid of personality: “I hope this email finds you well.”

A ripple of displeasure shot through her. “What business is it of a stranger to ask about my health?” says Baron, a professor emerita of linguistics at American University. Was the sender expecting to locate her injured, hungover, or otherwise unwell? “This person has no right to impose a relationship where it would make sense to ask about my health,” she recalls thinking.

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Baron’s reaction would have been much the same had a friend been on the other end of the note. In that case, “I would think, ‘Wait a second. Did I say I was sick?’” she says. “I take language at its word. If you’re going to inquire about my health, you have to have some reason to do so.”

Yet the phrase wasn’t always an empty reflex. We asked experts how it evolved from a sincere expression of concern into an inbox irritant.

Before email made it weird

Long before it became the beige wallpaper of modern communication, “I hope this finds you well” was a standard part of letter-writing conventions. One Civil War soldier, for example, began a letter home to his mother like this: “My dear Mammy: I hope this finds you well, as it leaves me well.”

“It originated as a polite, genuine expression of concern for the recipient’s well-being in traditional slow-delivery mail,” Baron says. Back then, it took a long time for letters to work their way through the mail system. That meant there was genuine uncertainty as to the recipient’s well-being. “It could take weeks. It could take months,” she says, “and the recipient could no longer be alive or well.”

As communication transitioned to email, the phrase—for some reason—stuck. Now, however, it’s rarely a genuine inquiry about how someone is truly doing. It no longer has any pragmatic force. “We have this frozen phrase that got taken from letters and then got glommed onto email,” Baron says. Especially as many emails have become a more relaxed method of communication, she says, “It sticks out like a sore thumb.”

Why people find it so irritating

“I hope this finds you well” is now such an overused phrase, it’s lost all actual meaning. “It sends the signal that no particular thought was applied, and it can come across as boilerplate,” says Nick Leighton, who co-hosts the etiquette podcast Were You Raised By Wolves? It strikes many people as performatively courteous. Does the person nudging you about a deadline actually care if you’re well? Maybe. But probably not.

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Part of the problem is sheer volume. Many people now spend their days swimming in text-based communication, with emails piling up alongside work messages, DMs, and group texts. “How many emails do you get, and on top of that, how many texts do you get and from whom and for what purpose?” asks Michael Plugh, an associate professor of communication at Manhattan University. Each new message gets buried underneath an avalanche of notifications before it’s even been opened. “So did the email find me well? I suppose it did,” he says, “but let’s get to the point because I’ve got 10 more queued up.” There’s simply no time for niceties that aren’t carrying their weight. “Everyone’s a New Yorker in the digital age,” Plugh says, eager to hurry up and get to the ask.

Plus, these days, some people associate the phrase with auto-fill. When you start typing “I hope” in a blank email, the suggestion frequently appears before you’ve even thought of it. “That means people are using it probably more often than they otherwise would, and that other people are seeing it more often than they otherwise would,” says Susan C. Herring, an adjunct professor of linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington and director of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication. “We’ve got this issue of AI generating things, and so we’re concerned that these formulaic things may now be bots, and people don’t like that.”

So how should you start emails?

During the worst of the COVID pandemic, Herring started all of her correspondence like this: “I hope you’re doing well during these difficult times.” It felt both genuine and appropriate, since she wasn’t saying it for the sake of politeness. “It was really sincere because we were sharing a common situation where there might be legitimate concerns that people were not doing well,” she says. Finding such ways to tweak “I hope this finds you well” to make it more personalized can help the otherwise rote opening line land better. When Herring is emailing a fellow professor, for example, she might say: “I hope your semester is going well.”

Chopping off just a few words and starting an email with “I hope you’re well” can even make the message more palatable. “That doesn’t grate on me quite as much—it’s only a slight rub, not a claw,” Baron says. That said, she still doesn’t think obligatory niceties are necessary, especially when contacting someone you don’t know. “My own feeling is to start with what you want to say,” she says. If she was emailing a fellow academic at a different university, for example, she would introduce herself and then tell them what she was working on. Then she might continue: “I would be very grateful if you could,” followed by her request.

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“That’s my take, and it’s not necessarily everyone’s,” Baron says. “But I’m guessing it’s the take of people who are sick and tired of seeing a line that now they’re supposed to read that has no semantic content to it.”

Losing the fluff is a good idea, Plugh agrees. There’s no longer any need for a soft lead-in to a main message. “Cutting out the niceties doesn’t hurt people’s feelings anymore,” he says. “What people want is a text message in the business format of an email.” Email has become a utility, not a conversation, he adds, and efficiency now trumps etiquette.

Wondering what to say in a tricky social situation? Email timetotalk@time.com