ETTING out of an e-mail exchange ought to be easy: you simply don't answer.

So how is it that some people often find themselves stuck in e-mail limbo, going back and forth with confirmations that the message was received, restatements of points already made, choruses of "Thank you," "You're welcome," "Thanks again" and "No problem"?

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Misty Young, a heavy e-mail user, attributes the problem to a lack of context and expression, which leads to "this neediness for more interaction to feel you've really `gotten' it."

"You send something out to cyberspace and don't know it's a done deal," she said.

Whether she ends an exchange or gets sucked into a lengthy winding-down, Mrs. Young, an executive at an advertising agency, KPS3 in Reno, Nev., finds herself vaguely unsettled as an e-mail exchange continues to unfold. She feels annoyed if she bothers to answer, guilty if she doesn't.

At work, for example, she might e-mail a document at someone's request. "Unless I get an error message, I assume it got through," she said. "I don't need someone to send a `Thank you for keeping me in the loop' or `Is there anything else you need?' or `Have a really great day.' "

But she often does receive such follow-up, and then feels obligated to respond with "You're welcome" or some other acknowledgment, whereupon her correspondent might respond again.

"I don't have people phoning me and then calling back to say thank you," Mrs. Young said. "People don't send thank-you faxes after they get your fax."

E-mail — purportedly so effortless, so unintrusive, so speedy — tends to drag on. It is impossible to send those subtle subconscious signals that say it is time to go — winding your watch, jangling your keys, eyeing the exit. There is certainly no chance for a goodbye kiss or wave. The conclusion of the exchange can feel jarring and abrupt.

In such a bare-bones communication medium, said Margaret L. McLauglin, a professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, "there's an absence of contextual and nonverbal cues that help to reduce ambiguity about the meaning of speech acts and the state of the relationship."

In an online conversation, unless you are using instant messaging, which operates in real time, there is never such a thing as Time to Go. "There are few plausible external justifications for breaking off the conversation," she said. "It is hard to find an e-mail equivalent of saying goodbye or hanging up, and thus there are no conventionally understood markers that signify when an e-mail conversation is over."

In a verbal conversation, however, people disengage with "a fairly conventional sequence of actions that unfolds in a predictable way," she said. They might sum up the conversation, offer a reason for ending it, exchange pleasantries or make "continuity statements" like "See you soon." Even voice mail allows for that kind of expression.

Mark L. Knapp, a professor of communication at the University of Texas, said, "In e-mail, getting distance from people but signaling that it doesn't mean anything negative is sometimes a difficult transaction to pull off, especially if the parties don't know each other well or the norms for communicating with this person aren't well known."

Without verbal cues, Tanya McLain, Mrs. Young's assistant at the advertising agency, gets confused. She almost always prolongs e-mail exchanges, often by sending a kind word or a thank-you if the business at hand has been concluded.

She finds it disorienting when others are less forthcoming than she is. "It is weird when you are dealing with someone who isn't expressive," she said. " `Got your information.' Well, was it informative, was it what you wanted, am I hurting your feelings?"

Not hearing back certainly concludes the exchange. "Silence is one way we judge that any conversation is over," said E. Sean Rintel, a graduate student in sociology at the State University of New York at Albany who has researched openings, closings and silences in communication.

But silence in e-mail is ambiguous. It could mean countless things, from "The kettle is boiling" to "I met someone better."

Then there is the coward's way out: claiming that the computer was down. "You can always blame it on the technology if you don't want to respond," Mr. Rintel said. "You don't have to accept responsibility as a social being at all."

Relative status is the greatest determinant of who concludes the exchange. It is nearly always the person of higher status, said Susan C. Herring, associate professor of information science at Indiana University. Rarely does the job seeker or the sales representative fail to reply.

"It is much more likely that my correspondents send me the last message," said Dr. Herring, who sometimes forgets to answer if a message has scrolled off the screen.

"I am likely to receive confirming or thanking messages," she said. "People are soliciting me — they want something from me and I don't want something from them. I try to answer every question and reply in such a way that they do not answer back." That includes neither asking questions nor introducing new topics.

Dr. Herring sees e-mail endings as unavoidably brusque. Even instant messaging lends itself to a kind of gradual disengagement, with people typically batting goodbye messages back and forth before finally signing off.

"On e-mail, there is no gradient," Dr. Herring said. "Either you respond or you don't."

Amalia Zea is among those who don't. She is conscious that her failure to respond makes people uncomfortable, but she is too busy to worry about it. As an office manager at Entertainment Weekly magazine in New York, she receives up to 100 e-mail messages a day and answers only those that demand a response.

"A lot of people ask me for something and I don't respond in an e-mail," she said. "Let's say somebody has a request: they need an air purifier. I just order it and they get it on their desk."

Faced with that ambiguous e-mail silence, however, they will sometimes send her e-mail several times in a row. She might finally write something like, "Yes, I'm here, I got your messages, you didn't need a response so I didn't respond. You sent me information, I took it and that was it."

To Ms. Zea, e-mail should be primarily for business use. "I think people who e-mail back and forth see it as a social tool," she said. "I don't see it that way. I don't have e-mail at home — I don't want it. The people who e-mail me are mostly at work, and they know I'm a nice person. I don't have to drag it out in an e-mail."

When friends send her e-mail, she usually replies by calling them. "The phone is better," she said. "You're actually talking to somebody."