ChamplooC

Thanks for the replied above. That is actually what I am doing now. Speaking of being professional on the department's side, I hesitated to add this to my previous post, but it happens again today and I feel very upset about that. During the application cycle, I got emails from professors in which my name on the top was misspelled--they mess up the first letter of my family and my first name.(By the way, my name is something like A*** B**. It is short and simple, not that difficult to make it right) This happens for three times. OK, it is still understandable, for some documents put the family name before the first name and that may leave people the wrong impression of my name. . But I also got emails which were not supposed to send to me, since I saw another accepted person's name on the top of the email. (And these emails were sent by professors, not the program coordinator. And they are all top programs) Although this professor later apologized to me and said that this email was supposed to send to me, I knew that it wasn't--since this professor mentioned that there are good people doing area A in the department while I am sure that I never wrote anything about area A on my SoP. It is still understandable when it happens only once. Unfortunately it happens again. At that point, I realized that probably they forgot to change the name when they copied and pasted the email content before they sent to me. I fully understand that it is impossible for the professor to write different emails to different accepted students, but at least they should double-check whether the name is correct before they send it. And I think this is the sort of thing which might make some applicants feel dissappointed (or not repected). Anyway, I still replied all these emails politely, and I tried to be understandable. The reason is that, just like what lurkingfaculty said, we are not in a position to do disrespectful things to the professors. Of course, some of these professors apologized for making my name wrong, but some didn't.

I don't know whether late reply will be considered to be disrespectful. Sometimes I got emails from several professors (including the director or ad chair) of a certain department which accepts me, and literally all of them will say something like "Please let me know if you have any question." But honestly speaking, I don't have so many questions to ask. It is easier to come up with some questions (e.g., about the program or the offer) for the director or the admission chair. But it is much harder to come up with some meaningful questions to ask for other emails sent by other professors, especially those professors you are not very familiar with. The reason why I find it so hard because many questions might be answered by browsing the department website or those professors' personal website, while other important questions might not be directed to the professors themselves--e.g., whether you are nice to work with. So I often take time to do some research before I reply these emails. And the workload can be huge when you get a couple of offers and receive a couple of these hard-to-reply emails (I remember, there is one department, I got emails from five different professors). I don't know whether I am the only person who has this sort of problem. In any case, I know it is definitely rude to ignore emails sent by the departments and there is no excuse for doing that, though I don't know whether late reply will also be unprofessional (for my part, asking stupid questions is also unprofessional). But I just want to share an applicant perspective of this issue.