Email seems to be a pretty popular topic, especially on the weekend. Last weekend a lot of tech sites were talking about why they ignore emails and auto responder messages. Earlier this week I checked out the refresh of Microsoft’s outlook.com and the reinvigoration of Hotmail. 

This week we’re first to bring you some pretty startling results about email. Our friends at Contactually, the popular email CRM startup from Washington DC, just published results from a rather interesting survey.

Engineers at the company recently analyzed over 1oo million email conversations looking at positive and negative words across the data set. What they actually found was that “On average, negative people tend to reply to emails 36% faster than their positive, bubbly colleagues.” Ousmane Mariko, community manager at Contactually reported on their blog. 

For the study engineers looked at wording in emails. Words like “care” and “amazing” made their list of positive words. Words like “missed” and “stupid” were considered negative. After they counted up all the instances of multiple positive and negative words they calculated the ratio between positive and negative words across the data set.

Overall what they found was that people who were always positive in their replies responded to 47% of their emails within a day. 64% of people who were negative or unhappy in their email replies responded within 24 hours.

“It’s not immediately clear why positive people aren’t as good with email,” Jeff Carbonella said, CTO of Contactually. “Maybe the negative folks are more active online in general.”

Carbonella jokingly suggested that this may explain interent trolls. Another cause of this could be that sending a positive email reply takes a little more time.

The study also suggested that users of Contactually were much better at quickly following up with their top contacts, citing that they generated 44% more referrals for their business.

“We don’t necessarily have to be mean and cranky,” COO Tony Cappaert said. “Maybe we just need to use better software.”

What is Contactually, find out here in our startup interview.