I’ve seen more than one of those ‘stop replying to all’ email chains too.
In my last firm we had a woman who made a snarky email comment about her boss - who she despised - to a coworker, and accidentally copied him in on it too. A large slice of crow had to be eaten. She’d actively sought out a transfer to that department, too.
I’ve seen those, though I never understood why people kept replying-all. At most, I’ll send a message directly to some of the people replying-all to let them know why that’s a bad idea but other than that, I just sit at my desk laughing at the idiots perpetuating the monster.
I work on health insurance, and at least once a month someone will hit a PDL with hundreds of employees instead of the person they’re trying to email, and we’ll get an email with all kinds of personal information on it
“Hello, today I got a call from Jane Doe, SSN 123456789, DOB 01/01/00. She’d like a prior authorization for addition sessions from her therapist Richard Roe for her self-harm, major depression, and bulimia. I see that she already had a PA, #123456789, but when I try to input more I get error code 1234 from the system. Can you please advise on how to correct this? Thank You!”
Obviously a major HIPAA violation. I assume there are some consequences for the person that sends it out but since it hasn’t happened to any one I know, I don’t know what they are.
Personally I did mess up twice in my 20 years, once I sent an email asking a department to review the wrong subscriber (had multiple screens with multiple subscribers opened and copypasta-ed the wrong one), once I sent a request to review the correct subscriber to the wrong person (was someone I didn’t know personally from another department, had the same few letters of their last name). Neither reached the notice of my manager so nothing became of them, but something of that more limited nature I’d probably just be in a discussion with my manager and the compliance department about being more careful in the future.
In the case I mentioned above, the system got so congested that reply-all emails sent in the first 15 minutes continued to trickle in over a period of hours. So in that case it wasn’t a matter of “people kept replying-all”, just a bunch of clueless early senders (and some early self-appointed do-gooders and wannabe humourists).
I’ve seen a few of these - none particularly interesting.
But they have caused me to wonder: Shouldn’t it be easy to send a mass email in the form of multiple individual emails? Sending out the full list of addresses in each email invites the Reply All disaster, while accomplishing nothing useful.
It is, with the BCC function.
The worst such blunders I saw was back in the early 1990s, when HR types would send group emails, copying large distribution lists including all interns (I was a corporate intern during summers back then), their managers, and others. Then, inevitably, one of the interns would hit a “reply all” with a short query or answer, and then someone in HR would do another “reply all” saying “don’t hit reply all” and the thread would bounce along like this for a bit. Then it would happen again a week or two later.
Working at companies over the next 3 decades, this generally wasn’t a problem if company emailing discipline and styles were carefully managed.
Then I went back to school, and have the fun of seeing this drama again. Here, school admins often send notes and offers out to the entire list of Aero/Astro department grad students, then inevitably, one student will send back a reply-all type note asking the admin in question for more details. Oops.
I make liberal use of the BCC function when sending out emails to groups of students, which is partly just a good idea to prevent “reply all” type issues, and also seems like a FERPA-friendly way of handling student lists.
Not exactly a ‘replay all,’ but along the lines of ‘unintended recipients,’ this happened at my work back in the day (just not to me):
In our email system at the time, to send an email outside the company, you had to select “Internet” as the recipient. Then you got another box to fill in the external address.
Well. . . One day, one of the employees sent an email out to some friend, and it included an ‘adult-oriented’ pic, but [this part is speculation, but it makes sense], apparently instead of selecting ‘Internet,’ he was off by one, and selected ‘Internal Auditing.’
Needless to say, things did not go well for him.
I have seen quite a lot of these blunders, and one deliberate one (someone sharing photos of one of the bosses having an affair, sent to the entire worldwide company 
)
In both cases I think it’s partly a gap in functionality of corporate email systems.
Most people don’t send messages to huge email lists very often, so I think it would be reasonable if there are additional steps to be performed before you can send to a large group for the first time. Plus there should be better support for detecting and purging the silly stream of “Your [sic] replying to all, dummy!” messages.
Let alone allowing an external email address to spam the entire company (as happened with my office scandal one).
This was wasn’t technically “reply all”, but it’s another variant of the “please stop replying all” email chains:
Back in the early 2000s I used to enter a lot of online sweepstakes (if you enter a whole bunch, as many times as the rules allow, odds are pretty good that you will actually win a few). The company sponsoring one of these sweepstakes sent out an email to everyone who had entered to announce who the winner was. A bunch of people replied to that email with “unsubscribe”. Except whoever had set up the mailing list mistakenly set it up so that the replies went to everyone on the list. (I assume they accidentally configured it as a “discussion group”. Remember email discussion groups?). So everyone got those unsubscribe replies. Then people replied to those with “Why am I getting this?”. And more people replying to tell everyone to stop replying. Oh, and the original email that started the whole thing went out on a Friday evening, so the IT person who created the whole mess was probably completely unaware until Monday morning, while all out inboxes were filling up with this nonsense for the entire weekend.
Right, and, as I say, I think the issue in this thread is a bit of a flaw in the mainstream email software. Or, if not a flaw, at least an obvious improvement.
Want to send an email including the word “attach(-ed)”, but without any files attached? No problem, outlook has got your back; a message box appears checking whether you want to attach a file before sending.
Want to send an email to hundreds of internal and external recipients for the first time ever? Done!
Want to “reply all” to those hundreds of people saying “Stop doing reply all!”? Donezo.
There was a massive reply-all email storm in the British NHS a few years ago. Not surprisingly, it was front-page news for a while.
I was once copied into an email chain. The “reply all” group of recipients included a customer to whom the company was providing a quote (this was a very big-name tech company). There was nothing controversial in the message that was sent, but buried way back in the long email chain was a comment to effect of “we’ve massively overcharged this by mistake. Ah well, let’s leave it as is. Ker-ching”. Regrettably, the customer was the sort to read the whole email chain. Luckily, I had only been copied in for info in the latest message which meant the ensuing clusterfuck wasn’t my fault or problem - but I did watch with interest.
At our federal agency we had a flurry of those about 10-12 years ago, but not since. Unsure whether it had to do with a new email or something. As I recall, the standard would be for someone to mistakenly pick the “all” address for some message or another. Instead of ignoring it (like the MAJORITY of official notices we receive! ;)), some yahoo would feel the need to Reply All saying, “This was not intended for me”, “Please remove me”, etc. That woul snowball, with folk escalating the rhetoric, attempting jokes, etc.
On occasion, we got official notices from VERY HIGH in the chain, saying it was bogging down our entire network, and that any additional replies would result in discipline. It was especially amusing when idiots would continue to Reply All even after such warnings.
Not sure why that hasn’t happened for the past several years.
Thanks to the magic of auto-complete applied to email addresses, this sort of mistake is alive and well. Case in point: at least two critical emails should have been sent to me by my advisor, but instead went to someone else they occasionally email. Autocomplete led them to the wrong person, after they started typing my email address. And they did not notice.
Yet another reason I would avoid a career in IT. You think you know your business and can do your job well, then this kind of terrifying explosion happens when you least expect it. Unless you are paranoid, expect everything to go wrong continuously, and obsessively double-check everything. Which is also no fun. And even if you are paranoid, things STILL go wrong.
You’d think that, an email application could put in a simple checking function and dialog, warning the user their email is going to go to a large number of recipients because they hit reply all.
This sort of thing doesn’t just happen with email addresses.
My doctor calls in my prescriptions to a local CVS. I’m not sure what system is used to specify where the filling pharmacy is located, but I suspect that if he starts entering the wrong cross street, then my prescription ends up in Scarsdale New York - over two thousand miles from the right place.
The source code hosting service github.com has always had a problem with reply-all storms. When you create a PR (a request to push your source code changes to the server) its easy to tag the entire organization (i.e. has everyone who has access to that code repository). When you are tagged you get an email, and when you reply to that email it will reply all. This is fine for small hobby projects, but now huge multinational companies are hosting their projects on github.
When someone posts a PR and tags everyone 100s of thousands of people get an email. It then becomes a reply-all “prisoners dilemma”: if everyone ignores it, no worries. But if one person replies all with “Hey stop spamming me”, some else will respond with “Hey YOU stop spamming me” and you’re in reply all hell.
I got caught in one of these at one of Nvidia’s github projects a couple of years ago, but recently the Unreal game engine (and a junior engineer) triggered the mother of all reply all storms. With the added frison that someone on the chain thought it would be funny to add some goatse images to the chain (Note to mods: thats a link to the wikipedia page not the Goatse image).
A colleague of mine once intended to send me a supplier contract to take a look at. What he actually did, thanks to the magic of email address auto completion, was send it to someone with a similar name to me, who worked for the supplier’s direct competitor. Oops.
Two bad ones.
I was working for a mid-size software consultancy company back in the 1990’s, around 1000 employees. Our employee list and client list were both considered to be confidential data, because they were very valuable to our competitors. Nevertheless, it was pretty easy to know the names of a majority of employees and clients. Periodically, around every two months, we’d get an email reminder that this was confidential data. Then one time, there was a company-wide email warning all employees that a specific competitor was seeking to poach employees and clients and we should ignore all emails from that competitor. (Which seemed to me to be inviting a contrarian response, as in ‘Oh maybe I should check out that competitor’.) When I saw the email, at the end of lunchtime, there were about a dozen Reply Alls from people saying they’d been contacted by the competitor. When I checked my company email again that evening, there were around another dozen me-too’s and around 60 additional exchanges from the people who’d been contacted comparing stories, again using Reply All, and mostly nesting the replies. This was in the days of dial-up Internet via a modem when downloading emails was slow. So pretty annoying.
One guy decided he was annoyed enough to Reply All and complain with a very snarky response. He sent out an email congratulating everyone who’d received an email from the competitor for being a valuable employee worthy of a competitor’s attention, but there was no need to promote their value to everyone in the company. He received a reply, a Reply All from the company CEO stating that confidentiality was a very serious issue and should be a concern of all employees.
I wasn’t close to the CEO, but knew him well enough to reply to him (directly, not copying anyone else). I politely stated my opinion that the snarky email was a complaint about the valueless me-too emails and further discussion that was replied to all. I also stated that I was similarly annoyed by all the valueless me-too emails. The CEO replied back to me that he would have HR review email policy. I forwarded his reply to the guy who sent the snarky email, expressed my sympathies and mostly never heard anything about it again.
The one thing I did hear about, so to speak, was several months later when I was at the company headquarters working as a trainer and was invited to a function. I was talking to a colleague when she was approached by somebody she knew saying hello. She introduced him to me, we shook hands, I stated my name and said we’d exchanged emails a few months ago. A look of dread came across his face, and he moved on pretty instantly. I never heard anything from him, about him, or about the incident again.
The other time was a weird one. I was working on a global rollout over a weekend in 2014. The rollout started in Asia and progressed westwards. It was supposed to be the UK’s turn around noon local time, and completed a few hours later. I was scheduled to be in the office on Saturday from 11:00 and leave once our portion of the rollout was completed. I also had to be in on the hourly status calls which had started around 04:00 UK time. The rollout was going badly, but I went to the office on time because 1) I had other colleagues working on the rollout who would be in the office, and 2) there were more resources available including a full workstation setup and phone, rather than working with a laptop at the dining room table.
The UK portion of the rollout started around 01:00 UK time the following morning, 14 hours late. And promptly failed with a scheduler issue. The department in charge of the scheduling software was in Singapore. So they’d been up even earlier than I had. I Instant Messaged my contact on the scheduling team, but didn’t get a response. I then raised an incident on the IT problem reporting software and tried to contact the scheduling team lead. Again no response. I then had to attend the hourly status call, and report that the UK rollout was also having problems. I was told to escalate the issue, which meant sending an email describing the scheduling problem to the rollout leadership, which included senior executive leadership. I also copied my boss, my nominal manager, our division manager, and the department APAC representative (who was not part of the rollout) on the email. Soon after, I was called by the very tired scheduling team lead who was able to sort out the issue. Our portion of the rollout completed a couple of hours later and I was able to go home after a 24 hour day.
The following Tuesday, I received an email from our team’s APAC representative, asking me what had gone wrong. I replied directly to her that we had started very late due to delays in the Asia rollout, that when the UK rollout had issues, I was unable to contact the Singapore scheduling team, and that escalation was required to resolve the issue which I felt was unhelpful. She forwarded my email to the Singapore scheduling lead asking for an explanation - something she had no business in doing; she should have gone through our department manager - but also copied everyone on the escalation email. So the next morning, I’ve got an email from the Singapore scheduling team lead stating that he had gotten out of bed after a very long day to resolve the issue and was very unhappy to have his team described as unhelpful. I also received an email from his division manager, copied to both my department and division managers, asking why I was criticising his lead who had worked very hard to make the rollout a success.
I apologised. I stated that I was making an internal team comment and I would have not have used casual language criticising others had I known my comments would be forwarded. I also sent a private email to the department APAC representative stating that she had screwed up badly and should be happy I apologised and tried to defuse the issue, rather than putting her in the middle of a cross-division controversy.
The funny thing is that after this incident, I asked to receive a copy of the scheduling software configuration for the next phase of the rollout, which occurred three months later. I received the configuration details two days before the rollout go-live. I replied that they had test server configuration set to go live on the production server. I copied the scheduling team manager on the email, but resisted the temptation to reply to anyone else.