It’s a classic humiliation story: you’re on a massive email chain and direct a snarky aside to one person, but accidentally send it to everyone. But how often does this really happen? I’ve made the opposite mistake of replying to just the sender when I meant to reply to everyone, but that’s usually less catastrophic. Has it ever happened to you, or in front of you?
I’ve never seen this happen in an embarrassing way, though I’m sure it has, and I’m looking forward to hearing some juicy stories. More often, it’s just annoying. Example: My wife received an email from the organizer of her HS class reunion, addressed to everyone in the class. We were then inundated with 475 “reply alls” from people who can’t seem to master the idea of “reply to sender.” Then people reply to each other, but “reply all,” and we get another big bunch. It goes on and on. Arrrgh!
Oh yeah, I’ve definitely seen the unnecessary as opposed to the clearly unintentional and embarrassing reply-alls. I always just assume those people are the kind of idiots who think 475 people care that they can’t make it that weekend, vs. the kind of idiots that hit reply-all when they mean to hit reply.
Most of the reply all storms I saw was someone replying all that they weren’t going to some event. Then you had the chain of reply alls about removing the idiots from the alias - to all, of course. And the reply alls saying that replying all was stupid.
Never actually saw an embarrassing one.
I’ve absolutely seen a “Reply All” of the variety of “This meeting is going to be a complete waste of time and I can’t imagine why we are wasting time on this doomed project” sent to everybody rather than just the person’s friend, including the managers and customers. That young-ish engineer was quickly reassigned (although he was absolutely correct that the project was doomed… maybe he should have been promoted).
And many of the “Please stop replying to everybody” replied to everybody.
Thank God I’m out of corporate America.
And really, most of the time it’s the fault of the person running the mailing list that doesn’t know what BCC: is for. If there is no reason for the recipients to be communicating with one another (and especially if they may not want their contact information shared), use BCC!
A year or so ago, we switched from Office/Exchange to the Google Gsuite, so all of our mail comes into Gmail. In Outlook, clicking on reply goes to just the sender but in Gmail (at least as it’s deployed where I work), reply goes to everyone. So I get a lot of unintentional reply-alls.
I did it classically in the early 2000’s when I worked at BBDO-NY.
This was the era of “Hey everybody don’t open any email with the subject line ‘How to Give your Cat a Colonic’, because that email contains a virus that will erase your hard drive! Please forward this to everyone you know!”
I worked in IT. We all agreed that the idiots promulgating this shit needed to be stopped from spreading misinformation. So one morning when one of these with a wide distribution list was forwarded, I did a deliberate Reply All and explained that the only sense in which it’s a virus is that by “forward to everyone you know” tactics it is infecting our mailboxes with lies, so please do NOT forward this.
Well, so yeah my Reply All was intentional, but I hadn’t had my second cup of coffee and didn’t carefully read who it was from.
BBDO-NY is a local chapter of the larger entity BBDO Worldwide which in turn is a property of a massive entity called Omnicom Group. The email had come from a Senior Vice President at Omnicom and he’d sent it out to the whole damn octopus, and I’d just corrected him in front of all those people and basically implied he was a blithering idiot in the process.
About 20 years ago, I was working for a company that had a policy that we had to give our passwords to a particular person so she could change put our out-of-office message on if we were out sick (yes, there are LOTS of problems with this idea… I don’t miss that employer for a lot of reasons).
One day, our password keeper lady sent out a mass email (50 or so people) reminding people to send her updated passwords. She used To: rather than BCC: because, quite frankly, she wasn’t all that bright. One guy replied to all with his password. About five minutes of dead silence filled the cube farm as we waited for him to realize what he’d done. Eventually, he blurts out, “Aw, crap!” and the whole room burst into laughter.
When I worked at msft in the 2000’s, every couple of years there would be a massive reply all. And then pile ons with people hitting reply all to say “don’t reply all you idiot”. And basically everyone in the entire company worldwide would have hundreds of emails in their in box.
There there were a couple of burn the bridges To: All that also had the same result.
I did a similar thing once, but in real life. I dealt with a lot of small issues at work, and it seemed the shit was flying from all directions. I’d often have a line of people forming at my desk. One day I was feeling especially crowded as a person in the queue was telling me their problem, so I focused on them to the exclusion of all others in the room, and when they had described their issue, I snapped, “Well, don’t tell So-and-so, she’d shit her pants!”
Next person in line, standing right there, was the aforementioned So-and-so.
A long time ago, I was very young and new to Outlook. The lab manager at work sent an email to the whole company saying we’re going to have a visitor, and we need to make sure there’s no trash in the lab.
I forward it to my buddy, saying something like “I guess we better keep (coworker) out of the lab that day!” Where the coworker was a female I had dated but was on the outs with at the time.
After I send it, I realize I did not remember entering my buddy’s name. And the email did not bounce.
There were two possibilities, I realized:
- I did a reply, in which it went to the lab manager. Not good.
- I did a reply-all, in which it went to the whole company. Catastrophe.
Thinking of option 2 I literally felt the blood drain out of my face. I must have gone paler than a sheet of paper. This has not happened again before or since to my face.
Not being familiar with Outlook yet I did not know you can just go to the sent folder and see who it went to, and try to recall it. So I went to the lab manager’s office, and he was kind enough to let me view the email, where I saw with great relief it just went to him. He was a good sport.
Several years ago in a federal training job where many of us were former military or law enforcement officers I hit reply all to a colleagues email vs replying just to him. Too late once I realized it. I basically commented that the subject of the email was a narcissistic boob and never really one to carry his own weight. My chief called me in and chewed me out, which I deserved, and said he’d note it in my jacket. I didn’t care as I was on the way out the door to a higher paying non govt job anyway. Well several on the email chain came up to me thanking me for saying what they all felt. So all in all it came out ok.
About 5 years ago (at our very large company) we had an email cascade where someone sent an email saying “Please welcome new employee So-and-So to the company!” to [very_very_large_email_list]
instead of [modest_size_email_list]
. So the email system for everyone on the very, very large list ground to a halt with all of the reply-all messages: “remove me from this list, please”, “hey guys, don’t reply-all”, “let me mansplain what happened here”, “check out this humourous meme relating to our situation!”, etc. It took hours until we could send and receive work-related emails again.
At least So-and-So had a memorable first day at the company.
We had a Reply All Kerfuffle, full of “Please do NOT use Reply All” and “Please remove me from this email list!” (sent to everyone, of course)
Someone reply-all’ed to that comment with: “There’s no way to remove you from the entire state-wide University system. That’s who these emails are going to.”
After a WEEK there’d still be a couple of these popping up.
I also once had a case where some moron wrote a long email to the entire very large company, about his arrival to Tokyo on a business trip, followed by hundreds of moronic reply-to-alls of “please delete me from this email” and a huge argument between those who wanted to hear more about Tokyo, and those who just wanted to do their fucking job. I’m still amazed that IT allowed some mid-level sales drone access to a list that included the entire company - you’d think they’d set that up so it could only be sent by executives, or required confirmation from someone in IT, or something.
Personally, had I been CEO, the original emailer and everyone who hit reply-to-all would have gone on the next layoff list…
Yeah, I worked for a while in IT support for our HR department. We were the only ones who could access the “everybody” lists. Once I had to send one as if it came from the CEO, and the only way to do it was go to his office and send it from his PC (this was ages ago). He had one of those huge old traditional wooden desks, and his keyboard was in a drawer (with a fold down front). I got to tell everyone I was in CEO’s drawers.
Not exactly a Reply-All, but …
A half-dozen of us 4 states away installing a new order processing system at a regional warehouse center for our grocery wholesaler. We all get the same email simultaneously on the company internal system. It’s from an employee Susie to her husband (also an employee) and contains slightly intimate details of how much she misses him and what she plans to do with him once they get home that evening.
Once we all recognized what it was, and finished laughing, the boss asked “But why did that come to all of us?” Appears her husbands nickname that she had set in her email box was Al. But if you mistyped that with 2 L’s, it becomes ALL which wasn’t in her email nicknames, so the system looked in the company directory for recipient(s). So it sent it to all 17,000+ employees in 30-some states!
She sent an embarrassed apology a few minutes later.
But we pressed the boss (A Company Director) to insist that the IT staff be reprimanded for having such an obvious nickname, and for allowing any company employee access to send an email to every employee. And, it turned out, many of our biggest customers also had emails on our internal directory.
So not a Reply-All error, but still an email that went to All by error.
I did it once. An email went out to the whole company about a blood drive. There were always three tables in the bloodmobile and it was almost always me and two other co-workers that took the first three spots and it was a running joke between us that we were Blood Brothers/Sisters.
I replied that I wanted my usual first slot but did so to the entire company. My Blood Sister, thinking that I had just cc’ed her as part of our joke, also replied all about taking one of the other 9am seats. What’s notable is that my Blood Sister was the head of IT.
I’ve seen it a few times.
Early in my career, someone accidently copied the entire company in an apology email to his girlfriend who also worked at the company. That elicited a lot of laughs.
The worst is when it’s a question and then half the company responds “no thank you” or “No, I won’t be attending”. Then the other half starts telling people not to reply to the email or at least not Reply All. Sometimes IT has to literally shut it down.
A few years back, a woman sent out a blast email to the entire NYC office asking anyone they wanted her 2 extra tickets to see the freestyle dance band TKA. So she had a lot of sarcastic responses like:
“I can’t go this weekend, but maybe ask me again in 1992” (they had a modest hit ‘Maria’ back in 1992).
“I’d love to go but my 8-ball leather jacket is at the dry cleaners.”
“Yes! I need those tickets and got to make them mine! I …got…to …make…them …mine! Just kidding, I’m not 14.”
So on and so forth
Not exactly a “Reply All” blunder, but a well-known music festival once sent me a mass email whose header showed that it was addressed to a mailing list called “Recalcitrant Ticket Buyers.”