State Dept E-mail Crash After "Reply-All" Storm

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 10, 2009 @02:40PM from the forward-this-story-to-all-your-friends-in-triplicate dept.

twistah writes "It seems that a recent 'reply-all storm' at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users 'reply-all' to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. One has to wonder if capacity planning was performed correctly — should an e-mail system be able to handle this type of traffic, or is it an unreasonable task for even the best system?"

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Bcc? by The+MAZZTer · 2009-01-10 15:53 · Score: 0, Redundant

I'm surprised noone else has mentioned BCC. BCC works like To and CC (AFAIK the only difference between THOSE is to indicate who the message is intended for) except recipients don't see the BCC list. So they only see themselves as the recipient, thus no reply all.
At least, that's my understanding of how it works. IANAEmailExpert.
(I'm the one who added the bcc tag fyi)