I do this often because this is when I wrap up the stuff for my day. But I wonder if it is considered intrusive.
I imagine a scenario where a phone that is linked to gmail rings due to my email, and that wakes up the person I intend to email.
Can people chime in whether it is out of the norm to email around midnight?
Should I try to refrain from doing this?
The good thing (maybe the only good thing) about email is that it's by nature asynchronous. A phone call in the middle of the night is intrusive, because there is an explicit expectation that the receiver does something about the call right there and then. An email is not like that - if you send an email, it will happily sit in the inbox of the recipient until they explicitly take an action to react upon it. Consequently, it does not matter when you send the email.
I imagine a scenario where a phone that is linked to gmail rings due to my email, and that wakes up the person I intend to email.
This is, in my opinion, not a valid concern. First of all, the kind of person who is annoyed by getting disturbed by email outside of work hours has a very easy fix to the problem - turn off notifications. In my opinion, if you explicitly have notifications enabled you can't at the same time be annoyed that you get notified.
Second, you'll need to understand an almost universal basic truth - starting from a certain seniority, most people in academia get a lot of email. Hundreds per day, in some cases. Many of these emails will come in during the night. If you wake up every time you get an email from one of your collaborators on a different continent, you won't get much sleep at all. So your email is highly unlikely to wake anybody up, because it will drown in the flood of other emails people get over the night.
That said, as discussed in a somewhat related recent question, if you are a supervisor or manager, it may pay to be somewhat careful about what "message" you transport with when you send emails. In this question, a student was stressed because their supervisor kept sending them mails in the night, and the student interpreted these as work items that needed to be done by the next morning. Also, if you as a supervisor are clearly working until midnight, it may implicitly communicate certain expectations and standards that you don't really want in your team.
No, you do not have to refrain from doing this.
What is midnight to you? Is it now? Because if it's midnight for you now, halfway across the world, it's noon. It's completely logical that someone halfway around the world will be active right now. If this person wants to email you, should he or she wait 12 hours until it's noon for you?
If anything, I'd say you (or the person you're emailing) should turn off your phone when going to sleep.
People have different wake/sleep and work/relax rhythms, and with flexible working hours and home office, it's hard to guess when people do work and when not (especially in academics).
Therefore I think the responsibility shifted from the sender to the receiver of the message: Most (all?) smartphones nowadays have a "do not disturb" modus which automatically turns off the sound and vibration at night or during personally defined times. Send me e-mails whenever you want or call me whenever you want, because if I don't want to be disturbed, I take care I won't.
I would say it somewhat depends on the nature of the message and overall context.
I am not troubled if a message from a colleague working in another country comes overnight, there are obvious reasons for it.
However, when I see a couple of emails sent by the Head of Department to the whole Department in the middle of the night, it's slightly concerning. In addition to the things explicitly requested in the email, it also implies that these requests are particularly urgent and important and keep the HoD working overnight. This in turn creates an expectation that such email has to be acted upon immediately, particularly if some colleague responds to it and triggers a discussion. A few repetitions like this solidify a culture, when colleagues are expected to take work home and are falling behind if they don't.
Can people chime in whether it is out of the norm to email around midnight?
It is not out of the norm
Should I try to refrain from doing this?
Yes. Despite other answers, I think your worry is justified and you should not send emails at midnight.
I agree with others that the receiver is in control of turning notifications on/off. With or without reason, some people will still get annoyed by your email and you don't want that. They might have notifications on by mistake or because they are waiting for another more important email.
More important than this, if they receive your email at midnight, they might read it! It's very likely that they won't spend much time doing so and are more likely to misunderstand, overlook or forget about it next morning when it's marked as read in their inbox.
Or they might reply to it! You have finished your day and want to take that email from your head and go to bed but, if they reply, I would feel obliged to clarify any questions that they have before going to bed as they are doing you the "favour" of working late for you.
I believe the best time to send an email is when you want the other person to read it, even if this is not guaranteed. I like between 9-10 a.m. when they have had their breakfast and read their inbox but probably not started seriously focusing in any task yet. It gives you the time to sleep on it and maybe modify it before sending it.
Furthermore, some people will flag those who are working at midnight as people with poor time management. I would try to appear to others like you work office hours, even if you don't. Depends on the environment but I think that it makes it easier for other people and more people will think of you as reliable, consistent and professional.
If this is something you are concerned about, there are some email clients (ie. Outlook) that allow you to delay sending emails until a specified time. I often do this to avoid the problem you describe.
I disagree with the notion in most of these responses that it is solely the responsibility of the receiver to turn off their notifications. I think very few people can resist the urge to check their emails when they 'shouldn't', particularly since they are so accessible. With delayed message sending it is not necessary for someone to receive an email outside office hours unless it is urgent.
This solves both your problem of wanting to wrap things up for the day and avoids interrupting others during the times they are not at work.
EDIT: To clarify my point, if you are concerned about disturbing people because you know you work different hours to them, you can use email delay to avoid this problem. I think it is generally good practice to use this if your email isn't urgent because a) if they do have notifications on it won't bother them and 2) you are helping you colleagues by not allowing them to work when they shouldn't be.
The word from Singapore is NO-Problem. We are on the opposite clock from your clock so my night is your day. If I send a message to America in the afternoon it's most likely after midnight in America. If the user hasn't disabled their mobile and you get a flame message back it's most likely that they forgot to enable their go-fish (ie. gmail out-office) responder. AI was invented years ago to handle this. Your more likely to get flamed if you tweet or instagram someone or send an IM to them after midnight.
I don't think I would worry about disturbing people - that is the point of email and what makes it different from instant messaging.
It is more of a worry that you may give people in the impression you want their attention outside their working hours. Particularly if you are emailing people junior to you they might think you are suggesting that since you work all hours, so should they.
We are encouraged to use the following email signature here:
Due to my own family/work balance, you may get emails from me outside of normal working hours. I don't expect you to respond to my email outside your working hours.
At the University of X we value and encourage flexible working patterns, so please be assured that I respect your working pattern and I am looking forward to your response when you are next working. "
In addition to @Katu's answer, which I like, you can...
Most mail clients (including webmail IIANM) allow for some sort of mechanism for scheduling messages to be sent at a later time. For example:
"Send Later" add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird
and:
MS Outlook | Email | Delay or schedule sending email messages
or you can just Google "delayed send message" and the name of your mail client / webmail solution.
I firmly believe that someone who replies to a mail at midnight will always know that this reply is not mandatory and will have been happy to get this out of the way quickly instead of during the next morning. So I do not suggest to intentionally delay such an email. That is unless you don't want the other person to know that you were awake at that time. I have witnessed a discussion where two people decided to fire someone who sent a message at 3 am telling his boss that he cannot come to work in one and a half days because of being sick. The reason given to that guy was another one, but the true reason really was, that someone being sick should not be awake at 3 am according to the persons in charge. Although I think this is a bit unfair, because the sickness might be precisely the reason why that person was awake, you should still think about the impression you leave when sending an email late in the night. Most people will not mind at all if you work at midnight, but some will. Even if you are the lecturer and you teach in the morning, you will leave a bad impression if your listeners find out that you were sending (an) email(s) less than 8 hours before that lecture.
Simply put,
It will not matter what time you send the email :). The timestamp of being sent is taken from your computer, and may be delayed by the SMTP server.
Email works like this:
You send Email => Server Receives Email => Server places email in users mail box.
User Checks Email => Server returns contents of user email box
