It has it's roots in actual letter writing, as in "I hope this letter finds you well".

I noticed a lot more people starting using it over the pandemic.

Annoying AF seems a tad hyperbolic, no?

When people used to mail letters by post to stay in touch a common opening was "I hope this letter finds you well."

It carried over from that.

I use this when the tone of my email would otherwise be, where's my spreadsheet motherfucker?? It's nice to modify the overall tone of the email to something more friendly. I have a very curt writing style so I'm often concerned my emails will come off as blunt or demanding if I don't include a pleasantry.

I work in a very friendly, informal field so I find myself doing little pleasantries to fit in, email-wise.

I can’t find this specific sentence in my inbox. So I guess there are some variations. It’s just the same platitudes as people asking “how’s it going” when greeting people. It’s a weird form of politeness I’ll never really understand, but is just there. It’s futile to try and change this, IMHO.

Dear OP, I hope you and your family and friends and relatives and co-workers are well

To nip it in the bud it's entirely the influence of the overly polite English and since Brexit this has deteriorated (de-Tory-ated). Just saying 😀

After some trepidation I'll confess that I find these "hope you are well" also annoying though it depends who the sender is. What I find more annoying are the "OK, boomer" comments on the Internet. I mean what can you say after such a reply ?

One thing that I've found with junior staff is that they feel a need to be overly nice in their correspondence without realizing the interaction takes time.

It’s just a salutation. A pleasantry. It’s a formal way of opening a correspondence. It’s considered polite. You don’t need to put one if you don’t want to, but if your message is terse, it can come across as rude.

I blame AI. I notice ChatGPT is always trying to put that into my emails. Maybe because of that, I'm also noticing it in lots of emails I get.

Pretty sure nobody has any real idea how to send text correspondence anymore.

Like, I work in a building 10+ miles away from my boss and often communication is done through text, email, occasionally by voice, but almost never in person.

Every time I send a work email to my boss/coworkers, I find myself staring at the screen wondering..."Wait, is there any particular way to start these things? 'Dear So-n-So' is really weird. 'First/Last Name' seems fine unless I'm sending the email to multiple people, which happens pretty regularly. Would just jump straight into the body of the text, but that seems... wrong somehow... and potentially confusing if an email address is not something that is human readable or mixed in with a list of email addresses."

Eventually I just bang something out and figure, whatever, its not like 90% of my emails seem to get read by anybody anyways.

I've only seen it as a statement someone adds to an email when they haven't contacted you in awhile.

can you imagine if they began every email with "how are you?"

then every time you would panic and wonder if you should reply