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

Tales of old.

[suso]

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".

Re:Tales of old.

[Whatsisname]

People would occasionally do that in my University classes of several hundred. I couldn't resist a reply-all with a simple "what", or better yet, "hey josh, what did you get for problem 7", then the ensuing storm of people reply-all messages saying not to do that, etc.

I love reply-all, I have gmail setup to use it by default. In my opinion it's a lot easier to avoid accidentally sending messages to everyone if your default behavior is to reply to everyone.

Re:Tales of old.

[ByOhTek]

I like the solution in K-9 Mail (android app) better.

The on screen menu has 'reply', you actually have to tap another button to get to 'reply-all'. It can be tedious, but it has prevented the reply-all issues in my case.

Re:Tales of old.

[MozeeToby]

Occasionally someone at my place of business somehow manages to send an email out to everyone in the department, or division, or even the whole company. Even on modern hardware the network will struggle if you send an email out to several hundreds or even thousands of recipients. But that wouldn't be so bad, what really finishes off the network are the several dozen people who feel the need to Reply All just to say "please remove me from this email last". Of course, after a dozen or so of those go out, you end up with two or three people sending a Reply All just to say "please stop sending your removal requests Reply All" The last one went out to 500 employees and I ended up with 40+ copies of the email in my inbox because of people being absolutely stupid.

Re:Tales of old.

[ByOhTek]

damnit. That was supposed to go to Whatsisname, not all of Slashdot!

Re:Tales of old.

[chameleon3]

agreed. I use 'reply all' every time, mostly because it's imperative to not leave people out of important emails. If my boss was CCed on an email to me, say, if I don't CC him on the reply, it looks like I'm avoiding him or didn't want him to have this information.

Re:Tales of old.

[hobarrera]

The solution is making people pay attention where they click, not "hiding buttons because users can't read", that same though is making popular software crappier every day.

Re:Tales of old.

[hobarrera]

Aside from what you stated, there's also that fact that if you Boss was CCed, NOT replying to all, would mean deliberately "kicking" him from the conversation. People should have common sense "does everyone need to know my response?" It's as simple as that.

Re:Tales of old.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You need to understand that mistakes can and do happen, and it's a very simple UI fix to prevent. As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used, it shouldn't be as easy to click as the single reply button, something that is probably used 99% of the time instead of reply-all, that's simply poor user interface design to do so. There is no need to have one rarely needed button with possibly serious consequences directly adjacent to the more benign button that most people intend to click anyway.

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.

Re:Tales of old.

[digitig]

Yes, and the button in an aircraft cockpit to fire a missile shouldn't have a little red flap over it, because the users should be looking at what buttons they press. Er...

Re:Tales of old.

[anyGould]

My favorite reply-to-all story (which is 100% true; I was there, I participated, and I got in trouble for it at the end).

My high school had just got "email" (in the "you can email your teacher and other students" sense - they didn't trust us with outside links, or didn't trust the outside with us, one or the other). First Class, if you know the software. A few interesting facts:

• You could see everyone who was online at the moment (and select the name(s) to send them an email).
• When you recieved email, it made a nice loud "ping" (and since everything was internal, it was near instant from "send" to "ping").
• From one of the walkways (that had computers for homework-use), you had a clear view/hearing to three different labs. (Just a quirk of the layout).
• This was '94, and the first experience most of these kids had with email.

Combine these facts, and you can mess with an entire school at once:

1. Pull up the list of everyone online, select all, send an email saying "Hi!"

2. Listen to the near-synchronous "ping" sound from three labs as they all receive the email.

3. Wait about ten seconds - at least two people will hit reply-all and say "who is this?" or similar.

4. Listen to a double-dose of "pings".

Wash, rinse, repeat - our best day we managed to have a continual storm of pings as emails whizzed back and forth. It only stopped when they sent teachers to the labs to instruct everyone to hit delete and leave it. (Which lead to getting in trouble part - although I think we got in more trouble for bogging the server down than for disrupting three classes *shrug*.)

The only better story I have is using Waterloo MacJanet's inability to delete a message without opening it first, combined with the ability to use alias to send an email to the same guy twenty times (as in, I hit send once, he gets twenty copies), to completely bury a friend's email account.

Re:Tales of old.

[EvanED]

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

"I don't use it" doesn't mean "other people don't use it". I'd actually say that half the emails I send are reply all.

Re:Tales of old.

[SBrach]

Please remove me from this distribution list.

Re:Tales of old.

[Rhaban]

Please stop woooshing to all.

Re:Tales of old.

[geminidomino]

Nah, he's probably right. Most sets of 'rules of X etiquette' seems to start out as a general set of rules for not acting like a dickhole, but invariably, it then swell up into a Lovecraftian monstrosity of self-righteous dogma.

Leave Reply All along

[Lord Grey]

Just think of it as an opportunity for Darwinism.

Re:Leave Reply All along

[idontgno]

That's like arguing we should be attracting dinosaur-killer meteor strikes to weed out the weak and unfit. A reply-all storm that size obliterates communication for the affected infrastructure for days. That's followed up by a fair bit of forensics, trying to backtrack the crapstorm to its initiating email, THEN followed by executing the guilty. Or not. If it's an executive secretary, it's probably just a mild talking-to.

OTOH, I've forgotten how many lulz there are to be had trolling in such a mailstorm, if you can get away with it.

Oh, BTW, epic fail DHS, but good work flushing out the Iranian spy*. Not that he was that good of a spy; if surreptitiously monitoring a DHS email list is equivalent to the Monty Python "How Not to be Seen sketch, asking the group "'Is this being a joke?" while signing your email with your real-world credentials ("Amir Ferdosi Sazeman-e Sana'et-e Defa' Qom Iran") is the same as the guy at the beginning of the aforementioned sketch who stands up from behind cover when asked to (and gets shot).

*Yeah, I know, he's probably not really a spy. But seriously, Homeland Security, why are you letting foreign nationals from adversary nations subscribe to your email lists? WTF?

Re:Leave Reply All along

[khallow]

So what happens if a friend and my boss are next to each other on my cell phone? That mean you call the wrong at the middle of the night one too?

Yes.

So what happens if a friend and my boss are next to each other on my cell phone? That mean you call the wrong at the middle of the night one too?

Yes.

Bad UI design means it happens whether the excuse is "really crappy" or not. People who think as you do, just haven't yet been burned badly by bad UIs. When it happens to you, you'll get clued in fast as to why "Pay attention to what you do" is really crappy UI design.

I think Reply All is very useful

[C_amiga_fan]

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.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[data2]

Please stop doing this. Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it. Your email client might have an address book and groups as an alternative.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[cras]

>>>Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it.

(1) Don't care because it saves me typing ~50 emails.
(2) Not if you change the subject. Then it starts a new thread.

No it doesn't. If you hit reply button, it adds In-Reply-To: and/or References: headers, so your new message will still show up as belonging to an old thread. Changing the subject doesn't change this in any email clients I know of.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[praxis]

Um, no. Threads are determined by other headers, not the subject, in any client worth their salt. Just because Outlook threads by subject, doesn't make it proper.

Re:I think Reply All is very useful

[colinnwn]

(1) You're not doing it right. You don't need to type 50 emails. You start 1 new message, and manually add the 50 recipients if you want to do it the hard way. Or create an email group of the 50 recipients and add only that group. Many email clients allow you to expand the group and delete individual recipients after that.

(2) Depends on how the email client handles threading. From experience, some will, some won't. Gmail will even occasionally start a new thread when nothing has been changed and it should have been part of a previous thread.

Let it be.

[lwsimon]

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.

Re:maybe reply-all should automatically be bcc?

[ByOhTek]

There are plenty of cases where that is bad - collaboration via email, it support with multiple groups, etc. I prefer options that require an extra bit of effort for the reply all, that usually works well enough.

Reply all for vendors who can't figure out BCC

[wheeda]

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.

Re:Why do we even have that lever?

[medlefsen]

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.

And of course Facebook says fuck you

[alex_guy_CA]

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

Bastards.

Re:And of course Facebook says fuck you

[g253]

Not true. The default is reply to all, but there's a tiny "Reply" link next to each message, which allows you to reply just to the sender.

The worst I've seen

[GC]

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...

Re:Why do we even have that lever?

[hedwards]

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.

Low tech equivalents

[RogueyWon]

"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.

Re:Low tech equivalents

[DerekLyons]

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.

Yep. I saw a guys naval career nearly end over a similar mistake - when we were doing some testing on sea trials a contractor needed to see a certain (unclassified) document, instead he was given the Secret version which he accidentally put in his brief case and took home... Fortunately the document was recovered, so the guy who made the mistake of handing over the wrong document was only busted in rank rather than tossed in the brig and then tossed out of the Navy.
 
The guy who ended up in the brig and then out on the street was the guy who tossed a Top Secret custody-controlled document in the trash, and put a plain old unclassified routine instruction back into the folder and back into the safe. (The mistake wasn't discovered for two days, until someone needed that Top Secret document from the safe...) You don't need new-fangled modern technology to ruin your career by 'deleting' the wrong thing.
 
Then there was the friend of mine who lost both copies of his thesis (the typed original and the carbon) because somebody stole his car with the briefcase containing both copies in the back seat... Stupidity in handling important data/documents goes back a long ways.

Easy in Thunderbird to fix

[satch89450]

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...

Re:Bedlam DL3

[fishbowl]

I had to stop reading with Osterman's comment: "But even though Exchange is a REALLY good email system..."

Re:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

[dwillden]

Reply all is great when organizing some family activity. Rather than make sure you remembered to include everyone in your reply, you just hit reply all and everybody gets the email. There is a reason Reply all exists. Perhaps the real issue isn't reply all but rather people doing massive corporate emails using cc: instead of bcc: which prevents the reply all fiasco. But then again wasn't there a /. article not that long ago claiming that bcc: was dead and useless? Death of BCC

So first we have a discussion about how bcc is dead and useless, and now we have a discussion about the supposed risks of "reply all," which risks would be substantially reduced through the use of bcc.

PEBCAK

[neurovish]

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.

Re: Inconsiderate (was "I think ReplyAll ...")

[value_added]

>>>Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it.

(1) Don't care because it saves me typing ~50 emails.
(2) Not if you change the subject. Then it starts a new thread.

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.

Re:Microcharging?

[nitehawk214]

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( x ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( x ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( x ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( x ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( x ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( x ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( x ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( x ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( x ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( x ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( x ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( x ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( x ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( x ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

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.