I read the whole thread and still can’t stop thinking about what a **big ** keyboard a cow would need.
You are not wrong sir! (I’m not in PSS though - so you can see how far-reaching this bedlam was)
Reminds me of a mailstorm we had a year or two ago where someone stumbled onto a d-list and posted their Glurge Of The Day. The reply-all “STOP SENDING THIS JUNK!!” followed by reply-all “DON’T HIT REPLY ALL!” followed by “TAKE ME OFF THIS MAILING LIST!!” mess got so bad that the Exchange admins suspended delivery of all mail enterprise-wise and quickly wrote up a rule to silently discard all messages with “Christmas Shoes” (or whatever the crap was) in the subject from all 150,000 or so inboxes enterprise-wise.
All because one person sent one email.
Amazing, isn’t it?
One nugget of d-list protocol: To prevent mailstorms, put the name of the d-list in the BCC: field. This way, nobody gets an email with 200 names at the top, and if they hit reply-all, it will be only a reply to you.
We need to talk about your TPS reports.
I was about to post that. We have a policy at work that if you need to send something to a large list, you send it to yourself, and BCC the list. Works well, till some nimrod just sends a message to the list. I myself live by the BCC. The BCC is your friend!
Yeeeeah. Otto, did you get that memo about putting coversheets on the TPS reports? If you could just remember to do that from now on…
Beat to the punchline. Damn.
By the way, try and say “fussy, picky” ten times real fast and tell me if you end up saying what I did.
:eek:
Of course, cows can only upload, not download.
Or is that stairs? I forget.
Another thing to do is restrict who can send to distribution groups. Then you designate someone in Corporate Communications as traffic cop. Only they (and a few other carefully selected people) can send to one of these groups.
Otto, I believe you have my stapler.
And yeah, we had that here too – distribution list e-mails + many Reply All = Fun for Exchange administrators! They reprogrammed the Reply All button in Outlook that now pops up a “Do you really want to do this” message with the No button the default. We still get idiots though the ignore all the safety equipment and show themselves to be dumbasses.
Fucky, pissy?
I cannot tell you how truly horrified I was to learn there really is such a thing as a TPS report.
:eek:
I like this as well, especially if you’re hoping to end a thread that’s already been reply-all’d too many times. However, where I work, bcc’ing a distribution list brings a whole class of pissy weenie out of the woodwork. The kind that sends you angry emails claiming that bcc’ing a DL is extremely bad manners because it screws up people’s mail filtering rules. Yeah, excuse the fuck out of me for your dumb ass writing an email rule based on something you know is wrong. When you write a rule like “if To: or Cc: lines contain ‘foo’ then store in the foo folder”, you’re making a stupid assumption (that people won’t bcc DL’s), and then you blame someone else when your stupid assumption proves to be wrong. Boo hoo, every once in a while your braindead rule misses an email. Cry me a fucking river.
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. The “never bcc DL’s” camp pisses me off.
Huh. Then how would you suggest designing such a filter so as to put all emails from “foo” DL into “foo” folder?
I know where you work. I work there too. Bedlam was not fun…
Having your DL’s put an identifiable header in the message works great for everyone. Otherwise, the problem is impossible by definition because you’re trying to make a decision based on information you’re not given.
The entire point of the BCC field is that you can’t see it in the received message. So it’s impossible to filter on it. By the same token, you can’t design a filter that files all messages BCC’d to Joe Blow.
Given that the problem is only really solvable from the admin side, many people go with the “it mostly works” solution of filtering based on To: and Cc:. That’s fine, as long as they don’t complain to me when it (completely predictably) doesn’t work right occasionally.
Such a good movie.