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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."
That's a nice email storm infographic they have. One time back in the 90s at Indiana University when people were mostly still using pine, a secretary at the College of Arts and Sciences sent out an email to several thousand students and put all their addresses in the two line. The headers themselves were a megabyte alone and it took a minute to open the message. Several people started replying to all and asking to be removed. It culminated with UCS terminating the mail in the queues and inboxes and suspending several user accounts. One guy replied saying something like "I just wanted everyone to know that Jim Smith takes it in the rear".
Just think of it as an opportunity for Darwinism.
At least that way the email addresses do not get spammed to everyone. Or maybe that should be an additional dialog:
Do you want everyone to see all email addressees, do you want to hide email addresses with bcc, or do you want to cancel.
So don't do that.
Corollary: Fire the ones who do it more than once.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Like if I'm sending "free books" or whatever to friends, I just click reply-all on an older email, trim out the 2-3 non relevant persons, and send off the email to all ~50 friends.
I've been fortunate never to have a "reply all" mistake at work or other embarrassing place. If anything I tend to hit "reply" by mistake, when I meant to include "all" the participants.
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Just make the "Reply" button bigger than the rest, and the "Reply all" smaller. Then separate them so they're not side by side.
Don't stop where the ink does.
I usually have the opposite problem. I want to reply to everyone included on the email, but I forget to hit reply all. I need to have an option to have the computer ask me what I intended to do every time I reply to an email with multiple recipients. It would be annoying, but that's the price I pay for my absent-mindedness.
Let it be, guys.
This is nothing more than social Darwinism. If you're dumb enough not only to send a nasty email, but to hit reply-all, you deserve what you get.
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Me Too!
I love the reply all button. When vendors send advertising to everyone without out using BCC, I reply all. The vendors usually stop doing that. I've even replied all with contact information for competitors.
My Yahoo mail account does not even have a dominant Reply All button, you have to use a pull down to use it. Seems a small interface change on Microsoft's part could make this a non issue.
Do you use email as part of your job? I am always a part of at least a dozen or so email conversations between groups of people. Reply-All is my default since I usually want to be talking to everyone in the conversation.
Make it so it asks you at least twice
Are you sure? Yes
Positive? Yes
Really? Yes!
Really really? Godammit!
Last chance... AAARGH!!
Okay, here goes... Make it stop!
Too late...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Bastards.
San Francisco Photographers
Maybe the dumbfuck to sends the mass emails in the first place should learn to BCC
Our CEO at a company I used to work for sent out an all-employee mail detailing a salary freeze for all employees and voluntary redundancies. Moments later the CFO sent out an email to his accounts team detailing that their pay-rise would not be affected and that they should not consider redundancy... needless to say, the hapless git hit reply-all...
Hidden isn't necessary, but it should come with a pop up asking if you're sure you want to reply all. Also the button shouldn't be right next to the reply button. As somebody else mentioned you don't have to hide the thing you can require an additional click to use it so that somebody is less likely to accidentally click on it when the mean to click reply.
Wow... that URL wasn't focus group tested beforehand. I read that as MS sex change team. Hmm... not I'll think of that every time I read about Microsoft Exchange. msexchange: It'll cut your dick off!
In nearly a decade at The Wall Street Journal, Bonds columnist Elizabeth Bernstein has covered education, philanthropy, psychology and religion - all areas in which personal relationships loom large. [...]
Somehow, I really don't think this article should be on slashdot...
The reply-all function might be a problem for your daily office employee, but c'mon, have you ever read an article that said "Hey people, guess what, when you type rm -rf / it deletes everything! Imagine the consequences..." ? ...
I mean, it clearly says "REPLY ALL" on the button, that's: 1. reply 2. to all
In my opinion, the problem is more a lack of knowing how to use the tool, rather than the tool itself. You'd be surprised how many people who work with computers every day don't know how to handle very basic functionality, let alone what every button on their screen actually does.
It would all be solved if we could microcharge for email. At $0.001 per email, no sensible use of email would build up a significant cost, even for the very poor. But if your message to the whole company cost $5, you might think twice. And the spam industry, of course, would become much less viable. I don't know how you could do it safely, reliably, unfraudably, but it would be nice to try.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
"Reply to all" is great for career-imperilling fun, but you can replicate the effect perfectly well with good old dead tree and snail-mail. Indeed, the closest thing I've had to a genuinely career-ending moment so far happened during my first year in work and was entirely down to a dead tree circulation mistake. Even now I still look back on it and cringe, even though I've since changed employers.
I needed to send two documents to different recipients in the (large) organisation I worked in, both of whom were based in different buildings in different parts of London. One was a routine, dull minute of a meeting. The other was a sensitive personnel-related document (relating to a staff disciplinary matter - I was in HR at the time). I decided to deal with the former first. I printed it out, put it in an envelope and put it in the out-tray for our internal delivery service (which had multiple collections daily and moved dead tree around our sites within about 30-60 minutes, depending on traffic). I then went back to find a secure mail pouch for the the personnel letter - only to find that the piece of paper I still had on my desk was the meeting minute. I look around and see the delivery guy vanishing into the lift with all of the internal mail.
Cue a 30 minute dash (and I do mean dash - literally running) across central London to beat the delivery van to our other site and intercept the envelope before the addressee could open it. I made it - by the skin of my teeth. Had I failed to, my career could have... well... turned out very differently - and not in a good sense. In a way, it was a good learning experience - I've been incredibly careful about what I put into envelopes ever since.
But it just goes to show that you don't need fancy new-fangled modern technology in order to ruin your career with a mis-addressed mail.
I work in an organization with 32 000+ employees. There is only one "Reply All" storm per year, and it's usually the fault of the sender for not using BCC in a distribution email. If this is a common thing at your workplace, you need email etiquette training or your mail admins need to get off their asses and properly administer distribution lists. Or even better, delegate the ability to manage the dist lists to group managers.
This is nothing more than an advertisement for a new AOL "feature".
If Lamar Odom can still make bonehead mistakes and pass it to the opposition a few times a year after playing basketball for 20+ years, some schlub in an office can still mistakenly hit Reply All.
Ah yes I remember years back getting an inter-office memo from a director telling us of a visit by the new VP of the company. I stupidly thinking I was just replying to a few co-workers sent back 'I'm so happy I'm popping a woody'. Imagine my chagrin at finding out the VP was part of the reply all and BCC to boot. Couple years later I got promoted and the VP jokingly mentioned the 'woody' statement so guess it did not hurt.
After reading a couple of standard SlashDot "shoulda do this" comments, I pulled up my mail program, Thunderbird, and customized my toolbar so that "reply all" is to the right of the Thunderbird "search" bar. Far away from "reply". 15 seconds to do, 10 seconds to check that it was "sticky."
Stop bellyaching. Start fixing.
Oh, way, this is SlashDot...
I keep my business-related conversations to my dept. account. I keep my university conversations to my university account. I keep my personal conversations in my gmail account or through instant messengers.
Keep the spheres separate and life will be easier.
...only people make mistakes. The simple answer is sllloooowww down, take a breath then hit reply (or reply all if applicable). Yes, I've hit the wrong button by mistake in my life, but that doesn't mean that we need to hide the reply all button or even pop up a window that makes me have to click twice to reply all. Thats just plain inconvenient. To those saying it's a outlook problem no it's not. I use Mac Mail on my Mac and thunderbird on my Linux systems and they both have reply and reply all right next to each other. I assume outlook is the same (I haven't used it in about 5 years). However at the end of the day the error isn't the program it's the user that clicks the wrong button probably because you're in too much of a hurry. No e-mail is THAT urgent take a deep breath and relax... think about what you're clicking and everything will be ok.
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Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates it's existence
Been there. Done that. At my previous company we removed the Reply All from the Notes template and made people take another step to get to it. It did achieve it's main goal of reducing the amount of mail sent but it also generated thousands of calls to the help desk. Non techies hate when something is changed. Highly paid non techies think it's their duty to complain constantly about minor changes.
I had to stop reading with Osterman's comment: "But even though Exchange is a REALLY good email system..."
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I wonder how long it would take your mail to download if there were 100 faces in the message. WHAT A BAD IDEA. thanks, AOL.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
You make that the default to Reply-All.
Open Outlook, load up the Visual Basic Editor and put this into a new module:
Then open an email and add a button pointing to that macro. After that, if you want to disable "Reply to All" then press the button. To re-enable, press it again.
Note! Only works on emails sent within same organisation. Only works on emails read on Microsoft Outlook. "Reply to All" is still enabled on other email clients (such as their Blackberry or OWA). Can be circumvented with a little VBA knowledge - however this will be beyond most people. Not completely foolproof, but will stop a lot of people.
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I have much more trouble (and have been burnt by) the reply-to munging on some e-mail lists. What it does is rewrite the Reply-to to the mailing list address instead of the original sender, so that people with semi-broken clients without reply-to-list feature can just hit reply-to instead of having to type in the address of the mailing list on a reply.
It's cyb:
become mature enough to stop pounding out angry rants?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Or you could try not being an asshole at work and keeping all of your correspondence in line with how you should present yourself. It is not the software vendor's fault if you are a moron or never evolved socially past middle school.
These are two different, and UNRELATED issues.
Accidental "reply all" is just that, an accident. Muscle memory, inattention, etc...it's going to happen for a variety of reasons. It could be handled as simply as a reply all having an extra "are you sure" dialog that includes a count of how many people will be receiving it.
reply all mailstorm is completely different...that is a result of INTENTIONAL behavior. people are INTENDING to reply to all, usually to show their idiocy by saying "stop replying to all". No amount of "are you sure" or other cute crap is going to stop people from intentionally, but inappropriately replying to all.
Technology can't prevent stupidity. Either we remove the ability to reply all or we live with the consequences.
Self awareness - try it!
true,and completely impractical.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The reply-all command is the main, default way of replying.
Reply-single is for the rare special case when a question is broadcast to a list of people, such that the answers are private or mutually uninteresting.
Reply-all is critically important for most e-mails involving multiple people, because without it, you fragment the discussion. You the end up with the "what, you didn't get the e-mail???" type situations.
More than 90% of all replies that I send on a daily basis require Reply-All, and I use it habitually even for e-mails sent only to me. Why would I want to hide this behind an extra menu, or otherwise make it harder to invoke?
The best practice is to hit Reply All and train yourself to double check the list of recipients in light of the nature of the reply. If anything, it's the Reply command that ought to be harder to invoke, or eliminated entirely.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I can't think of the last time I used "reply" over "reply all" when it was an email with multiple people. If it's a shitty broadcast email, delete. If it's a conversation with multiple people, I want to email them all. Just pay attention to who is in the to and cc fields if you are so sensitive.
How about when hitting "reply all" the mail client pops up a message box confirming that the user wants to "reply all"? Question is.. Is the annoyance of a confirmation box worth it to avoid a career ending mistake or, at the least, a healthy dosage of WTF? Part of me prefers that the career equivalent of "social darwinism" kicks in to reward reply-all stupidity. Then again - haven't we all written heated emails when we've been tired at some point in our careers? Personally, to avoid such mistakes I have a rule - I don't write heated or rude emails in the mail client directly. I write them in notepad and when I've calmed down, I usually rethink the text and it never gets sent.
Don't make "Reply to all" easy to do or don't make it easy to mistake for "Reply", or both.
I would suggest that overloading the Reply button would be the best approach. It would behave much like the Firefox "back" button: Click to reply, click and hold for a menu that includes "reply to all." Yes it's a little slower if reply to all is common for you, but that's what toolbar customization is for. You certainly will make no more mistakes.
Alternatively, put "Reply to all" *FAR AWAY* from "Reply." Like on the right-hand side of the toolbar, where "Reply" would remain on the left. Simple, effective. I've no idea why these changes were not implemented years ago.
I want my Cowboyneal
At my current job tho, people hate being left out of the loop, so reply-alls are the norm, rather than the exception. "Think before typing" hasn't been repealed, people just act like it has.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
First, you may not care, but you're writing for the benefit of the addressee, not yourself.
Second, changing the Subject doesn't do squat, modulo what some email clients do with that change. Threading is based on the References header.
Third, your opinions are being posted to web forum. Is your use of email quote delimiters pulled out of the same bag of silly tricks, or haven't you figured out the HTML options offered by Slashdot?
Personally, I'm annoyed by lazy and inconsiderate people. I'm even more annoyed having to manually re-edit the message (break the thread), and invent a Subject line for the sender so I know WTF the email is really about. Why there's so many of you out there is anyone's guess.
I mean, I guess it happens that people accidentally reply-all... but I've never done it and I've never been on the receiving end of it. I've been using email since the mid-80's from a personal standpoint and I've had a number of corporate email accounts, both large and small. I can't recall a single instance of this happening. The reply-all storms that I have experienced were clearly intentional, with the people doing the reply-all knowing full well that is what they were doing.
So I wonder if there really is a case of people "accidentally" hitting reply-all and not just *claiming* they accidentally did it when they do something stupid. I mean, shit, I'm sure it happens now and then, but is it really that big of a problem, this "accidental" reply-all? It sounds more like a problem of people using it inappropriately than of people using it accidentally. I know my experience is purely anecdotal, but you'd think if it were that widespread of a problem I'd have run across it at least once in the past 25 years.
That all too brief time between your action and realization of said action.
'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.' Screw that. I had a user last week going crazy because she couldn't send an email to her boss. I was at home sick, so after talking to her on the phone for about 15 minutes and having her freak out because of it and having her boss yell at me to fix the issue, I crawled out of bed to log in remotely to her workstation. The "problem" was that instead of putting an email address in the To field, she opted to just write the name of her boss and ignored the error messages. If you can believe it, she wouldn't admit she was at fault and still said it was my problem.
Reply All isn't a problem. As others have mentioned it bcc, how do we teach the ignorant MFs about bcc, perhaps bcc should be the default instead of to and cc?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
My life got a lot easier when I adopted the rule to never write anything in e-mail that I wouldn't want forwarded. Not only does it prevent the "reply all" problem, it also prevents the problem where the person I ranted to cc:'s the subject of the rant, either accidentally or as a way to stab me in the back.
Also, one thing I discovered is that while, as a geek, I chuckle when someone sends me an e-mail ranting about some idiot who deserves it, other (non-geek) people often feel uncomfortable when they see it. I think they now feel burdened with this new information that people that they work with aren't getting along, or something to that effect. My work life got easier when I stopped making the people around me feel uncomfortable, and I bet that my fellow socially awkward geeks would also see similar results.
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I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
The confirmation should include the number of destinations. That's one extra click and a little reading to reply to the reasonable number people involved with a project, and one extra cancel button click when you realize that replying to everyone in the company isn't what you meant to do.
I actually had to check in my mail client to see if the Reply and Reply All buttons are next to each other. They are, and I didn't even know it.
Who (at least of the Slashdot posing crowd) doesn't do the equivalent of Command+R for reply or Command+Shift+R for Reply All and leaves the toolbar buttons alone?
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if we prevent the stupid from killing themselves we will never advance as a species, and will always have to deal with stupid people
-Lod
I came here with the intent of saying that it's ridicules to be using TO or CC for long lists of people in the first place, so reply all is a non-issue. As it turns out, apparently, large portions of slashdot are spammers. I keep seeing things like "I use it to keep the team together" or "how else do you keep on top of a project?" and other similar sentiments. As a consultant, one of the first bits of training I give to companies is proper email formatting. And the first part of that is distribution lists, and then proper mass mailing formats. TO: YOURSELF : CC: THE BOSS BCC: EVERYONE ELSE.
I guess such wisdom falls on the deaf ears of the current generation of IT. After all, you guys are all too busy checking the 400 messages you receive a day. 98% of which aren't for you, or don't add anything useful. My current employer has this problem, he spends most of the day checking and replying to email. But he doesn't get paid for doing that, and neither do most of you.
I'm not saying that reply all and long lists of people aren't useful in some cases. They are. Essential in fact. SOMETIMES. Far more often you are wasting your time, and everyone else's. I would ask you to take an objective look at your inbox, and figure how much of that cruft is actually helpful, and how much of it you could get by without. Now consider how much more time each day you would have, if the only messages you got or sent were critical.
Email in the workplace has ballooned so badly that in some cases, I've actually recommended turning it off. I'm not talking about a 20 person office either, I'm talking about fortune 500 companies. I'm well aware that before email, it was phones. The difference being, in an office, being on the phone is obvious and what you are accomplishing is also obvious. If you are wasting time, your boss knows it, you know he knows it so it's a self limiting issue. With email, no one can tell the difference between typing an email with value, typing an email without value, or typing that TPS report you were supposed to have on my desk yesterday. I sent you a message about it, didn't you get it? FAR too many office workers spend FAR too much time trading email of little or no value what so ever. And don't even get me started on grammar, spelling, composition, or intelligent discourse.
A fun exercise, get your IT director, the highest level manager you can find, and someone from HR. Now, pull 10% of the days mail que down to a terminal, and sit down and review the contents. Have the IT guy obfuscate the TO: FROM: fields, and just look at what is written. I've never done this with anyone that didn't decide that email usage required some {more} training.
A big mailing list such as "everyone-seattle-office" should be access controlled so that only certain people can send to it. If you receive mail because you are on the "everyone-seattle-office" alias, and accidentally hit Reply All, the "everyone-seattle-office" list should bounce your response: "Oops, you don't have permission to send to the everyone-seattle-office alias".
Problem solved. The office secretary doesn't have to remember to use Reply-To: or Bcc:, and neither does anyone else have to remember to use Reply for that message rather than the usual Reply All.
There is nothing worse than technical discussion being fragmented when people forget to use reply all! If I don't want my recipients to interact with each other, I will use BCC.
Unfortunately, that's the nature of beast. If the issue is keeping things separate within a single system, then maybe you just need separate systems.
Remove the ability for the human to make the error.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... there's no reason to count an email as part of the same thread once the subject has changed ...
Sure there is.
The subject is often related to something at the start of the thread that becomes obsolete. Changing the subject when the actual subject of conversation changes keeps things sane - especially when something important comes up. (Example: A flash team debugging something and, after several iterations of "try this" "no that didn't work" something significant is discovered.)
Thread by Subject: (rather than References: and In-reply-to:) and a change of subject splits the flash team email into different parts of a crowded inbox. Oops! But don't change the subject and someone multiplexing among several teams may waste hours because the subject line didn't inform him that he needed to open the email and pay attention to the new development in THIS task NOW.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
to move the reply all button to the other side of the screen. Most people hit reply all because they're too quickly trying to hit reply. Make folk look for the reply all and it'll cut down on a bunch of mistakes. Just a thought
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Really? Doesn't seem that hard; I access my work/university mail (I work at a university) with Thunderbird, and use the web-based interface for my personal account open in a browser. Not impractical at all.
If I were inclined, I could access everything in Thunderbird, but I like keeping things separate and not storing personal mail on a work computer.
I can't believe it took this long for somebody to say this. Maybe I missed an earlier one. But, this is the first one I found. Everyone else is blaming UI design and lack of sleep. No people! Stop ranting on your work e-mail system!!! Sorry, no mod points here.
It's amazing that no one's copied Mulberry's Reply dialog.
Agreed. I also have Reply All as default, for the same reasons.
It's just easier, plus it makes you more aware in the rare cases when you don't want to Reply All.
Yep. Outlook for business. Webmail clients (separate) for other accounts.
How about making the To and From line RED or some striking color when a Reply All button is clicked. The user will get accustomed with this 'theme' and they will immediately realize that they may have hit the 'Reply All' button accidentally. It's not a NP hard problem I suppose. The companies I have worked for and the university I've studied at all have the policy against Reply All emails, specially when group aliases are included in the original emails.
I used a similar system in a university setting with 5 accounts in thunderbird. The problem I had was that thunderbird would seem to randomly decide which email address to use, even if I specified which I wanted to use. This resulted in work email and email to students coming from my personal accounts (e.g. penguinchris, which isn't too bad) and my "spam" account I use to sign up for things, which isn't really embarrassing or anything but it'd seem weird to most.
So, your solution of keeping personal stuff truly separate is important in those kinds of settings.
Of course, I was using my own laptop so it would have been annoying to not load my personal accounts into thunderbird, so what I should have done is use a different email program altogether for my work accounts.
"I wonder if the Reply All problem would occur if you saw 100 faces in the email,' AOL's Bill Wetherell says."
I wonder what would happen if you started taking responsibility for your actions and start thinking before you do them...?