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.

[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.

[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.

And of course Facebook says fuck you

[alex_guy_CA]

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

Bastards.

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.

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.