I’m adamant about not responding to just “hello”. So far it’s never been an issue — eventually they send the question.

And you think they would learn not to do that, but they never do.

I think part of it is cultural. At $PREVIOUSJOB we used a lot of Indian outsourced devs and they were quite big on the "hello" thing. Could have been what the outsourced company told them to do, too, but they did stop after being asked to, mostly. QA seemed to hold on to it. They were predominantly women, so not sure if that played into it.