I’m on business travel, and over the week, my cellphone has downloaded 34 emails all in regard to a corporate-sent policy update:
HQ: “Good news! You can increase your 401(k) contributions! Happy Holidays!” Joein a ‘Reply to all’: “Why am I getting this? I’m on the pension plan. . .” Phyllisin a ‘Reply to all’: “I already contribute 11%” Mikein a ‘Reply to all’: “PLEASE don’t Reply to all!!!” Dougin a ‘Reply to all’: “unsubscribe.” Noreenin a ‘Reply to all’: “Please stop replying to all!” Phillipin a ‘Reply to all’: “I can only contribute 4%. This email doesn’t apply to me. . .” Nancyin a ‘Reply to all’: “I don’t understand the policy. I donated already.” Other Joein a ‘Reply to all’: “Please stop replying to all!”
. . . and you get the picture. I’ll spare you the ~25 other emails’ summaries.
Besides the point people are kinda/sorta divulging their financial information to the entire company, people are “Replying to All” to ask people to stop “Replying to all.”
I myself have had a direct, techincal email sent to two recipients be forwarded to others (people kept getting added to the “To:” field, only to spiral out of control with innane, non-related discussion when people “Replied to All.”
WIth modern email clients, isn’t there a way to turn off the “Reply to All” function with an email option, prior to sending it?
Tripler
This is beyond my CHAIRBORNE Ranger capabilities.
Yes, they should have put the recipients in the Bcc field, which stands for blind copy. To expand on this, recipients in the Bcc receive the email, but their address does not show up in the To or CC fields in the email that everyone gets. If someone were to respond to the bulk email, the only address in the headers would be in the From field. It wouldn’t matter if the recipient used Reply or Reply All, since there wouldn’t be any addresses in the To or CC headers.
I’m surprised at how often marketing emails from companies don’t use Bcc. I’ll sometimes get a promotional email from a company and the To field will have hundreds of customer email address along with my own.
That’s what I prefer people do. I think you should have someone, even if it’s just the sender, in the To field.
And I’m surprised the OP’s string of replies was only 34. I’ve had a lot more than that when this happened, and this was at a large information technology firm (where I would expect people to know better than to reply all).
Oh lawdy, that just gave me PTSD from the memory of coming to work after three days off to find out some bunch of idiots had done exactly this and spending an hour deleting 500+ reply-to-alls from my inbox. Most of which were replies to all saying “Stop replying to all!!!1!”
The biggest fault is with the email handler programmers, who put “reply to all” as the default in the list. Put that fucker all the way on the bottom and the problem would end immediately.
Depends on how the email client is programmed. There’s nothing stopping a developer from implementing such a function if he/she wants to. For example, Microsoft Outlook has such options that can be configured by the administrator. Of course, there’s nothing to stop a user from replying, and then cutting and pasting the list of email recipients into the reply by hand. And email clients/systems are not required to obey each others custom-directives anyway; it’s not like there is an official “disallow-reply-all” email protocol function that all systems must adhere to.
You can also handle this server-side by doing things like disallowing certain users from emailing a distribution list, setting a max limit on the number of allowable recipients per mail message (and rejecting non-compliant messages), and other such server-side filtering methods.
At a large financial I used to work at it started with one of the senior managers - somehow - accidentally emailing the entire company with “Do we need milk? I’ll get some on the way home”
The first reply-all, mere seconds later, and not from the intended recipient, was along the lines of “Aye Jim, and can you get some eggs too? Cheers”
It was the first of many, many replies until they had to take the email servers offline for a bit.
Some people like to take the opportunity to share their wit with the entire company, even though they’re not as funny as they think. Others are the ones sending “unsubscribe” as if the string is some sort of voluntary mailing list, or saying “Please don’t reply all” to everyone.
For the benefit of the youngsters, let me explain the double c. “Bcc:” was the typist’s code for “blind carbon copy”. In the days before email and copying machines, copies were made with carbon paper.
Sure, you could create a client that recognized codes in an e-mail to disable features. But that would only help you if the people reply-alling were using that client. Most clients would just ignore the codes, and continue to let everyone in the company reply-all.
Nor is making the reply-all feature inconvenient to use the right solution, because there are a lot of cases where you really do want to reply-all (just, not to the entire company).
BCC is really the only solution to the OP’s issue.
Given the prevalence of this issue going back a long, long time, I’m surprised that every email program on the planet doesn’t make you click a couple extra times before the “reply all” goes out.
“Hey, did you notice that this email is going to be sent to the following 183 people?”
click
“Please type in the number of people that was listed in the previous window before continuing.”
“183”
“Okay, I’m going to send it in one minute. This window will stay up until then and you can click “Cancel” to stop this from going out to all these people.”
Ditto initial emails accidentally sent out to a large mailing list.
And that prompt is a clever bit of programming. If my message says something like “Attached please find”, but there’s no attachment, it will pop up to warn me that I may have forgotten the attachment. Exchange/Outlook also let me know before sending the message if any of the recipients have their out-of-office message enabled, to warn that they’re not going to see the message.
The problem is, the email client (in general) has no way to know how many members a distribution list has, or indeed if a specific address is a distribution list or an individual. Environments where the client is more tightly integrated with the server, like Outlook, might be able to do something like this, but an IMAP/POP client couldn’t.
But if it’s a distribution list, depending on how it’s set up, a simple “reply” might still go out to everyone. If the client is sending to a single address, and it still goes to 183 people, the problem isn’t that people are clicking “reply all”.
I was once involved at a non-profit where a supposedly-professional, paid staffer sent out a mass email, with all the email addresses visible to every recipient. Including the confidential, private emails of some very wealthy donors who were major funders. A couple of them called the President to complain about this exposure.
He cme storming out of his office, publicly, angrily reprimanded the emailer, told him he was immediately suspended for 3 days, and “then we’ll consider if we need you services any longer”. Everybody in that organization was very careful not to expose our whole contributors list again! And really, this should just be standard professional practice for anyone.
A helpful use of Bcc is when an initial email goes to many people, but followup emails only need to go to a smaller set. Whoever trims the other people from the email can put those addresses in the Bcc so those people know the remaining people are continuing the discussion.
For example, an initial email goes out to 10 people asking if anyone can help fix a problem. One person who takes ownership responds that they’ll work on it. Whatever people they still want to be in the email chain can stay in the To or CC fields, but they can put the people being dropped in the BCC. Subsequent Reply All replies will only go to the smaller set of people.
I am NOT a computer expert but at my former company they had some feature turned on that would alert you if you’re sending or replying to an email with a large number of recipients and you’d have to click on the, ‘Are you sure?’ Someone on the cleaning staff might get a pass for replying to all, but if you’re a college grad working a 50k job in which you’re required to be very computer literate, your manager isn’t going to be happy that you replied to all.