Yea. let me tell you about the time a person set their out of office assistant, then got an email from another person who also had their out of office assistant set, and both accounts sent so many “out of office” emails back and forth, responding to the last reply, it shut down the system.
Our system now only sends one reply to an account when the out of office assistant is set.
We use reply to all frequently at work as we doing adhoc requests off a shared work register. “All” is generally the requester, anyone they copied in and all our work team. Makes life way easier for all concerned.
And if you click yes, the e-mail program should respond, “No, dickhead, I’m not sending this to 247 people.”
Correct. BCCs should not be visible to other recipients in any way. I think there probably have been flawed implementations of it in the past where the headers were leaked, but I’d be surprised if any modern client or webmail solution handles it insecurely now.
I heartily endorse this thread. And when it’s you’re boss who is the main offender, it totally makes you want to chuck a computer out the window.
Ha! I experienced this just the other day at work.
An employee sent an email to a group address (W2-Info) by mistake thinking it was going to single mail box. Since it was to a group address, and thus no one saw their own email address on the actual email; the first 10-15 people asked with a Reply-All: “Why am I receiving this email?” Evidently people couldn’t figure out that W2-Info wasn’t a person; but was in fact a group email that listed everyone in the company who might need to receive W2 information (and this is a pretty big company).
Then the real shit storm started! (and thus the reason for my post here) What needs to be turned off; is the ability to reply-all with text “stop using reply-all to this email!” :rolleyes:
It was frustration and humor all in one. WTF makes you think in that pea brain of yours that you’ve been deemed King God of Email that YOU are the one person allowed to use REPLY-ALL only to tell people to stop using REPLY-ALL?
The good news is that Outlook has a nice little feature where you can set up a quick rule to just forward all of those emails into the trash; so even then it wasn’t a big deal.
Yep
The first people to fire(at) are mailing list owners who don’t make it clear it is an alias.
I once started one of those issues because in a list of 20 needed recipients I didn’t notice ‘Edd.Notif@company.com’, was also copied,which was the Enterprise Data Distribution notification list, which had about 4500 people on it.
As stated by others, large distribution lists should be put in the BCC by the original sender to prevent this from happening.
But I do agree with the OP’s sentiment, that the offenders of these work protocols should be the first to go when lay-offs need to be made
Sending a RTA to ask that others stop replying to all makes sense to me, even though I can see why that is annoying. Because how else are you gonna nix the problem before you have 100 more people doing it? Might as well cause some a little short-term pain to stop the tsunami.
No, but you can cut and paste from the CC: line to the BCC: line.
Because when you do this five other people will RTA to say how dumb it is to RTA to tell people to stop RTAing. The best you can do is to find the list owner and tell him/her to disable the list. Or, you can refrain from making the problem worse.
Almost everyone who contributes to the disaster are either asking to be taken off the list, showing they are clueless, or complaining about it, also showing they are clueless.
I once sent an email to 2 people saying that an issue wasn’t related to me at all and that somebody else needed to be responsible for it. One of them replied all and added a couple of people to the thread so they could figure out who was. Those people added other people, so on and so forth, and when they finally found the right people they started discussing the issue. On a email train entitled “Issue XYZ is not owned by [Rysto’s team]”.
20 emails and 1 week later I finally snapped and told them to trim the distribution list already.
Oh, come on. Some of the “reply to all” responses I’ve seen, both at the office and in my social circle, have been just too hilarious.
For example there was one where somebody emailed a person about not having her United Way pledge yet. She replied with a bunch of vitriol to the person who sent it and…replied to everyone who had gotten the email. That wasn’t even the most hilarious but it’s the only one I remember because we all started congratulating her for her candor and saying things like “right on, sister!” and she had no clue what we were talking about…for awhile…
I was once in charge of getting biographical data for a bunch of people, and I sent out an email to the slackers telling them if they didn’t send their bios I was going to make stuff up. I then sent this to my co-chair on this thing with an example of the kind of stuff I was going to make up, i.e. “J.K. Rowling was last seen driving a stolen red Chevy truck away from a Whataburger somewhere in New Mexico…” only of course I used the real names of some of the people who hadn’t responded. My co-chair then sent me a reply and sent it to EVERYBODY with my original message attached, which, fortunately, most of those people had a good sense of humor and didn’t kill me. (Okay, one of them did kill me.)
“Reply to All” mailstorm: Best way to leave a company when you get laid off!
What do you say? porn?