When students receive emails from professors, they can often be overwhelming with how disorganized the feedback is. Some professors also deliver feedback in a disrespectful tone. We wanted to address how feedback given over email affects students course participation and behavior by manipulated respect and hassle of emails for participants to respond to. We conducted the experiment with 148 college students who were presented with a vignette in which they were asked to imagine receiving feedback via email from a professor. The vignette varied along two dimensions: the respect conveyed in the email's tone and the hassle associated with it. This manipulation resulted in four conditions, and participants were randomly assigned to one of these conditions. Respect was defined as the extent to which the feedback conveyed esteem and consideration, while hassle referred to the perceived time and effort required to complete a task. We analysed the data using a 2 (respect: high, low) x 2 (hassle: high, low) between-subjects ANOVA. The results revealed significant main effects related to the level of respect in the email. Students who received emails with a low level of respect perceived their professors as biased against them and indicated a decreased likelihood of participating in class. Even among the high respect condition, students who imagined receiving emails with high hassle reported lower perceptions of their professors and a reduced willingness to engage in class compared to students in the low hassle condition. Our study highlights the crucial role of both respect and hassle in shaping students' perceptions of feedback delivered by professors via email. The main effects underscore the importance of fostering respectful and constructive communication in virtual learning environments. Furthermore, the nuanced findings regarding the influence of hassle shed light on the complexities of student-professor interactions in digital platforms. These insights carry significant implications for online education, emphasizing the need to establish supportive communication channels to enhance students' learning experiences.