Stopping the Horror of 'Reply All'

theodp writes "The WSJ's Elizabeth Bernstein reports that Reply All is still the button everyone loves to hate. 'This shouldn't still be happening,' Bernstein says of those heart-stopping moments (YouTube) when one realizes that he or she's hit 'reply all' and fired off a rant for all to see. 'After almost two decades of constant, grinding email use, we should all be too tech-savvy to keep making the same mortifying mistake, too careful to keep putting our relationships and careers on the line because of sloppiness.' Vendors have made some attempts to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot and perhaps even starting a Reply All email storm. Outlook allows users to elect to get a warning if they try to email to more than 50 people. Gmail offers an Undo Send button, which can be enabled by setting a delay in your out-bound emails, from 5-30 seconds, after which you're SOL. And AOL is considering showing faces, rather than just names, in the To field in a new email product. 'I wonder if the Reply All problem would occur if you saw 100 faces in the email,' AOL's Bill Wetherell says."

Comments

And of course Facebook says fuck you

[alex_guy_CA]

The only reply in Facebook is "Reply all." You can't escape.

Bastards.

Re:Tales of old.

[Eevee]

As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used

There's a difference between "should only rarely be used" and "I rarely use." Just because it's not part of your way of doing business doesn't make it wrong. I find reply all essential for keeping a team of people together, particularly when there needs to be coordination of tasks.

The real problem is people don't use BCC more for mass distributions. If you don't have the addresses, you can't spam them back with a reply all.

And if so they're entire tomes of crock.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I'm pretty sure there are entire tomes of email etiquette books that universally advise against the use of "reply all".

And if so they're tomes full of something else as well.

"Reply All" allows the instant creation of a task-based "mailing list" in a business setting, without the overhead of setting up a mailing list and tearing it down after the task is done.

If the mail tools didn't have it, participations in a flash crew would require copying all the addresses every time. That's a job for a computer, not a busy worker with a mouse and incipient carpal tunnel syndrome. And accidentally dropping one address can not only disrupt the operation but offend the lost worker.

Imagine the effect on office productivity of doubling (or more) the time to communicate. It can dwarf the time spent in deleting the occasional emails from being improperly added to the Cc: list on mail exchanges that are one-shot or will peter out in short order.

Sure "Reply All" can cause problems. So can fire, or virtually any other powerful tool when improperly used.