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Companies Getting Rid of Reply-all
An anonymous reader writes "An article at BusinessWeek highlights an issue most corporate workers are familiar with: the flood of useless reply-all emails endemic to any big organization. Companies are beginning to realize how much time these emails can waste in aggregate across an entire company, and some are looking for ways to outright block reply-all. 'A company that's come close to abolishing Reply All is the global information and measurement firm Nielsen. On its screens, the button is visible but inactive, covered with a fuzzy gray. It can be reactivated with an override function on the keyboard. Chief Information Officer Andrew Cawood explained in a memo to 35,000 employees the reason behind Nielsen's decision: eliminating "bureaucracy and inefficiency."' Software developers are starting to react to this need as well, creating plugins or monitors that restrict the reply-all button or at least alert the user, so they can take a moment to consider their action more carefully. In addition to getting rid of the annoying 'Thanks!' and 'Welcome!' emails, this has implications for law firms and military organizations, where an errant reply-all could have serious repercussions."
please take me off this distribution list
... I don't know where to begin.
The majority of reply-alls can be replaced by using mailing lists.
I hope somebody replied to all, quoting this entire memo and putting "OK" at the bottom.
-Dave
I welcome this trend, a few extra confirmation boxes would help.
Can we also get rid of excessively long sigs, embedded graphics, comic sans and outlook stationary too? Or at least made them more difficult to automate.
Mindless drivel is their filler, when they can't make any real work. Tell the CEO studies show employees are fooled into thinking they have value when engaged in useless activities.
They can have my command prompt when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Yes, it will reduce the number of accidental, serious information breaches. It will also reduce the amount of co-worker spam (I call that bologna, since it's not quite spam).
But sometimes, the awkward and accidental reply-all is the only source of amusement in an otherwise uneventful day at the office.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Those people who constantly send out large blasts of useless email are just not sufficiently harassed by their fellow employees to stop. Reply all serves a very important function when running large multi-day problem resolution threads that require large amounts of collaboration on a global scale. To remove the reply all means that everyone has to remember to constantly add back everyone "important" to the thread. Reply all is a tool, the problem is that sometimes the people using the tool are tools themselves. Fix the people not the tool.
Mailing lists and reply-to-all are a lethal combination. 2/3rds of the E-Mails I get are dups -- someone will start a ticket, which E-Mails a list. Everyone who has something to say will reply-to-all, which will mail everyone and the ticket system, which will then bounce the mail out to the list. You can't get off the list because your boss thinks that even though 99.9% of the list traffic doesn't involve what you do in any way, there might some day be one that might require your attention. The only problem with that is that one message will get lost in that flood of crap, so it's pointless to be on the list anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I would love to hear this. A button to disable it? How draconian, what are we in the dark ages? In Exchange each message thread has an ID --- why not simply make a pointer to the one copy of the message - whether the user is pulling off the server or in the .pst file? Boy, I guess these guys never heard of the concept of DEduplication.
Thanks!
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Here's last year's attempt to do something about it. Maybe something is happening this time?
Oh and,
Not to mention for terrorist organizations...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Person A sends you an email.
You reply.
You forgot something, and reply again.
With Gmail, it will reply to A.
With Outlook, it will reply to yourself.
The broken solution is to use "Reply to all", which will only reply to A and not to yourself.
If you remove "Reply to all", please fix "Reply" first.
I don't mind Reply-All so much, but can we get rid of the yahoos who top-post and quote the whole damn email chain?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
People working at large tech companies have been exposed to email since the 1980s, and email itself has been around since the 1970s. It isn't something new. You'd think that by now, people would have learned to be careful. I think I made this mistake once in the late 1980's, and it was sufficiently embarrassing (and I got enough nasty replies about minding "R" vs "r" in mailx) that I learned my lesson and haven't done it since then.
Reply All serves a useful purpose for small ad-hoc email discussions between groups of 5 engineers let's say. If you put the button behind some "protection" such as described, that will work for a little while, up until clicking past the protection becomes an automatic action. Then it'll be as if there was no such protection. This happens with other things too, like the Windows "you SURE you want to run this virus??" dialog boxes, where people reflexively click past the warnings without paying them any attention.
Really though, given 30+ years of email now, why are people still making this mistake? I can understand it during maybe the first year you've seen email and you're still learning what it is and how it works. But it's been ubiquitous for decades. Approximately nobody is new to it any more.
what you do is charge the sender in your currency
1 X to do a reply all (AT ALL)
2 Y for each person sent to
3 W for each KB the message takes (single copy)
4 +60% if the response contains the ENTIRE previous email
5 Z for each time the Company Sig appears in the email
If W X Y and Z are high enough this could be a Profit Center for your business
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Through domain policy, they were able to disable the button in Windows XP but when folks switched to Windows 7 it was back again. Plus, it doesn't affect Mac or Linus users. Regardless, most people just learned to use the keyboard shortcut instead of clicking the button and it's as easy to Reply-All as ever. Mostly we still get the same amount of spam as usual and whomever got paid to come up with that suggestion should be let go. What a complete waste of a paycheck.
You tell me, working with all those Big consulting shit companies where no one has a clue what they're really doing there and spamming mails with dozens of CC's. end the funny shit is that the reply all grows on each strike.
My personal peeve is people that hit Reply when Reply All is required. I deliberately included those other people in the original email, because they need to be part of the discussion, don't cut them out. You've just forced me to add them all back in again on my reply.
bleh ... typo
When "reply all" is chosen. Instead of opening the message with all users listed as recipients. Change the command to "reply multiple"
When chosen, open a window with a checklist containing all the recipients unchecked by default.
Ask the user, to check each recipient they want in their response message, and click OK. Only the recipients they manually checked will appear in the reply message.
My God. I don't know what's more sad - that we live in an age where some people feel the need to police the use of "Reply All", or where some corporation will actually go to the expense to remove it.
In days of yore there would have been a pretty simple solution: if you misused it your boss would sit you down and tell you never to do it again. Case closed.
Now, can someone tell Gmail that it would be handy to be able "Resend" a Sent message that bounced or was deleted at the other end by mistake?
Three Squirrels
This will last until someone does a study on the time people waste having to re-add recipients to replies that actually do need to go to more than one person. Then the pendulum will swing back the other way. Yes, Reply All gets abused. Yes, in some instances, it can be replaced with distribution lists. No, removing Reply All is not the answer.
Incidentally, disabling the Reply All button in Outlook the way Nielsen did does not remove the functionality. It just forces people to learn one to the many other ways of accessing that particular function. (menus, key strokes, etc...) It also has no effect on anyone using other email clients.
that gets sent reply all so that its the last thing they ever do in the firm.
I really like the solution to the "reply all" problem that is used at Google. It's part social and part technological. The social part is that people make an effort to trim TO and CC lines -- though "reply all" is the default, and for good reason. The technological part is "mute".
Since Gmail already groups all e-mail conversations into threads, it's easy for it to provide the user with a means to opt out of a conversation, even if they're still on CC. I use it all the time... if a thread is clearly no longer relevant to me, I just hit "m", and I never see that e-mail conversation in my inbox again. It's still in my archive and I can always search for it (including seeing all subsequent messages after I muted it)... but other than that it doesn't bother me.
Gmail also does an awesome job of collapsing quote text. It's there if I want to click on the "..." to see it, but otherwise it's out of the way, and it works equally well with both top- and bottom-posting. For that reason, the general practice is not to trim quotes. They're invisible when you don't care about them, but preserving them provides full context for any newcomers to the conversation.
It's still not ideal. I think the ultimate business communication vehicle will look something like a cross between e-mail and a web forum, but in practice Gmail is pretty darned good. Which is a really good thing, because Google runs on e-mail, and Googlers get massive amounts of it. Between direct e-mails, automated system status notifications and internal mailing lists (some are general discussion lists, others are focused on specific projects, or teams, or technologies), I get >2000 e-mails per day. Filtering, priority inbox and selective muting are all essential to making it manageable.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
At my company, someone sent an e-mail to several groups asking a question. Several dozen replies came back saying that they weren't the right ones to be asked. Scores of replies followed, all asking to be removed from "this mailing list". Then hundreds. Followed by threats to report people to HR if they keep "replying to all" (sent to "all", of course. Followed by hundreds more. Followed by a very high up threatening to send people to HR if they keep "replying to all". Followed by hundreds more requests and demands to remove them from the mailing list. It finally died down, until the next shift came in and hundreds more e-mails came around. Again with the next shift after that.
I expanded all the address groups, and then expanded all the sub-groups and so on, then pasted into a word doc and counted the '@'. About 10,000 people had received nearly 1000 e-mail each. It happened again a few weeks later.
If you put the distribution list in the bcc field, the only person inundated with stupid replies is the sender, which serves them right. It's also a way of saving idiots from themselves when the reply is....inappropriate.
After a massive Reply All storm involving our whole firm over someone getting offended too easily, our COO jumped in to tell everyone to knock it off and the Reply All button was moved to the far right end of the toolbar. This has helped for the most part.
The majority of reply-alls can be replaced by using mailing lists.
That requires someone to administer the mailing lists, or to set up a process to let it be administered automatically. Reply-all, on the other hand, empowers small ad-hoc groups to form instantly around an issue, without red tape delay or extra expense that might provoke middle-management nipping-in-the-bud.
I've just started a contract at a very small company. (My work there is unrelated to I.T.) They contract their system administration from an individual supplier. Getting anything done is extra cost, so it doesn't happen unless it's critical.
On the project where I'm working we're in the early design discussions. Everybody on the project is in on everything. Reply all works just fine for what we need. (Indeed, the early problems with it were OMISSION of people who SHOULD have been on it.) Removing reply all would just mean most of the people in the group would spend extra time copying email addresses (and occasionally drop one, interfering with communication). Yes we might end up with a "please drop me" later in the project. But for now we're far better off with reply-all than without it.
I've been in companies where reply-all explosions were a problem. The solution was not to kill reply-all, but to create mailing list aliases and procedurally restrict who could mail to them. Then doing a reply-all to a message on a department-wide or division-wide mailing resulted in a bounce on mail to the big list and/or a reply just to the originator of the mail. Problem solved.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is brilliant. Hope my company adopts this as quickly as possible. I don't have time to read time wasting work-related mails at my job. In case you missed it it's the season and I have my hands full doing on-line shopping and hunting down coupon codes. I already hardly have any time left to read the frickin' news sites. And I guess if you think your mail is so important, just put a request at the bottom to consider forwarding it to the next member of the department or project team, so each person who receives it can make a balanced decision whether to bother a next person with your mail, that interferes with other priorities.
My karma ran over your dogma
At least three times I've seen an off-color joke sent in a reply-all, that included a company-wide address in the list that the sender didn't notice. Once, I similarly received an excel file with all salaries (very small company).
Except for the caberet, I say 'good riddance' to reply-all.
Agreed. But the real problem is that most mail server software doesn't allow or isn't configured to allow arbitrary users to create and share their own mail lists. Reply all is a horrible feature if you have the entire Microsoft Redmond campus being e-mailed. (Saw it happen around 2000, the 'please remove me' from this thread reply email would bring all the mail servers on campus to their knees for a day or so.) It is a great feature if you have ten people you are carrying on a conversation with who don't have access to a shared mailing list. Also, like most tools, this feature is really only dangerous in the hands of idiots. Until every mail server/client allows sharable delivery lists, we are going to be stuck with this feature.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Based on the replies I think I'm alone, but I lose way more time trying to reproduce emails that I never received than the 1/10th of a second or so that it takes to delete emails I received that I don't need. Especially if they say something like, "Thanks" it can't be more than a second of wasted time. Please, send me everything, I'll filter through it.
Not sending emails in the first place to the entire company if you do not want to waist their time?
It sounds to me that either the originators of the email is at fault, or there is something very wrong with how all these people use email. And technical solutions never solve personal ignorance.
If someone actually reply-alls to an entire company saying "thanks!" then they are not qualified to use email in a profession setting.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Nielsen outsourced there IT so that figures
An email sent to more that 5 to 10 people probably doesn't need to be sent at all. Daily I get between 10 and 20 emails ranging from "Please read this update to our employee handbook, we just clarified that viewing porn, even while remoting in from home, is bad" to "Please donate some money to X charity so we can claim that we, as a business donated the money misleading our customers into believing that the company contributed when it actually was our employees." and lastly my favorite "XYZ application that you never use, have never heard of, and could care less about will be rebooted at 12am and have no effect on anyone what-so-ever"
I don't need any of it. For the love of god make it stop. If you're email is to notify me of something I might not care about and I do not need to take any action on it, then I do not want it. Don't send it for fucks sake. I have work to do and reading a 3 page email about a blood drive that you wont let me go to unless I use my lunch anyway is a waste of my time.
Seriously, in every big org I've worked out there is some senile old asshole high up in the company that doesn't realize that people on the other coast don't need to know about his open golf date.
The solution is to set up a filter that auto-trashes mails coming from that VP.
I have been advocating this for years. Don't remove it as it is needed in some cases, just make people think before they use it.
I would prefer that people could properly use email, but that isn't going to happen so its 'babysitting' time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... deprecate unit of time known as the OhNo second.
Have gnu, will travel.
old news; this has been done since (at least ;-) the last century
BCC by default, only To and CC when explicit action taken by the first mailer.
So so many of these problems are solved by simply putting a reply-to field; Then choose the people you actually want the person to reply to. If you send to a big mailing list, make the reply-to go to you alone; gather any results and summarize for the list if needed. If you send to a bunch of important people you can make sure that the ones that matter get the mail on the way back. Best of all; you can even send a mail to one person alone and make sure that they reply back to everyone who needs the information without irritating those people with the original mail.
Just remember to put a little note telling people you have done this ("replies set to:xxx" is the standard form) otherwise many people just don't know that this might happen.
How about making it mandatory to mute everyone on a conference call? It never fails...you get on some big call with maybe 100 people and there are kids screaming or dogs barking in the background. The moderator asks people to mute their lines (#6 or some such) and most people do...except for the idiot with the screaming kids and barking dogs. Then we all sit around waiting until finally the moderator puts everyone on mute. Huge waste of everyone's time.
At the beginning of the call just mute all the lines. Tell people how to un-mute the line if they have a question or comment. Problem solved, time saved, happy day.
My boss hates to be left out of the loop. He insists that people have reply to all as the default, and would rather more people are in the loop about what is happening than not. However, I work at an academic institution, so things might be a bit different here.
With that being said, perhaps some kind of "reply to individuals" would work out well, where only those individual people in the list are replied too instead of those in a mailing list or in a group.
There it is.
Is it really that hard to delete or ignore an email? The bigger problem is when people DON'T use the reply all, on a subject that everyone should remain on the email chain for. For most intelligent people it only takes a few seconds to scan an email to know if it's relevant to you. Lack of communication causes business more problems and money.
So here's my idea for a new mail system that fixes some of these problems, but might have other problems.
The email server should be both an email server and a forum/mail list.
Whenever someone sends an email (or just a reply) the server starts a new mail thread with that as the first message (if it's a reply it can have a pointer back to the other mail thread I suppose so you can follow that back too).
The email recipient gets only the first message of a thread, and they then have to click a 'follow' button if they want following replies.
Reply All messages get tacked on to the full mail thread, and any followers get an update that a new message has been received.
The recipient list of the original message can act as a security filter as well and limit others from viewing the thread, because at any point anyone in that thread (whether following or not) should be able to select the original email in their list, select/open view replies and instantly see the whole conversation anyways.
Should be easy to allow others into the conversation as well by forwarding the thread to them. Again they decide to follow or not.
This would work really nicely for internal emails. The problem I see is when you send a message to 'outsiders.' But I think if both servers are aware, then the external server would just duplicate the whole thread and new messages added to the thread get replicated to the other server. Haven't thought about it enough though so I'm sure there might be other issues here.
As for the damn sigs problem. Add to the mail protocol a sig feature. If the server/client is aware then it can display a little box/picture/whatever beside the email to represent the sender. Then mouse over/touch/drill-into/whatever on the user and you can see their sig and it gets it out of typical viewing areas. Questionable downside to this is for the people that put 'security' or 'legal' messages in their sigs. Well, no one EVER reads them anyways, and frankly if those messages have gotten out to the wrong person then the harm is done already and those messages are useless.
Email servers are not my expertise, so someone else go forth and make this happen please :)
Chris Regnier (too lazy to sign in)
Seriously, am I the only one around here who has fucking heard of BCC?
My employer (7000+ employees) avoids the reply to all issue by sending all mass communications via the BCC address field. Reply to all then becomes useless.
A simple solution that has existed since forever.
If you don't want people to reply-all then use BCC *facepalm*... *sigh*
Where I used to work we ran a news server, and avoided a lot of pointless emails that way. Also has the huge advantage that the whole thread is available irrespective of when you get copied in and everything is archived in one place for easy reference.
Then you still get the "moving this to Bcc". So I don't do mailing lists.
All "sigs" automatically added by your email client.
"This message has been scanned for viruses ..."
In one recent email this sig appears 7 times.
"Send from my iPad" and "Sent from my iPhone"
These sigs are all just shameless advertising.
The reply-all button is a very useful invention. If i want to reply to an email about a meeting where a certain group of people is involved, then i need a reply-all button. Not having it at all is a little fucked up.
What indeed is the problem (no to be circumvented with turning this off):
* missing use of bcc when sending out a mass email to many persons
* email lists which are not moderated. Why would anybody allow these at all for "all employees"? It also prevents gruntled employees from demotivating email to all others.
* missing email nettiquette
* missing use of rss to communicate updates to things its easy to use, and suitable for notices about specific topics
* general limitation in the number of recipients
Why not use Usenet instead?
As an admin, I receive about a dozen requests daily to take various actions. Sometimes the requester CCs a group list. That's great. But other times, they CC a dozen or more individuals. I do not know which people on the CC list really need to receive my reply - I have to assume that the originator does know who has a need to know. I guarantee you if I drop someone from the list because I don't think they need to know, I will receive serious grief from that person. OTOH, if I reply all, someone else will complain about being spammed.
For me, bottom line is that when I'm requested to do something, I reply to all. If some recipients consider it spam, they can complain to the originator of the first email.
This year my company implemented a No Reply All policy, disabling the Reply All button in Outlook. Fortunately, the shortcut still works.
I really hate being punished because other people are morons. Punish the morons, not me.
The funniest thing i've ever seen with reply all was someone accidentally including an e-mail group in an e-mail.
This group just happened to include every single employee of the company, all 85,000 of them in a dozen different countries.
People would hit reply-all which included the group address asking to be removed which would be sent to everyone again. A few hours later the entire e-mail system fell over for 2 solid days.
I could not stop laughing. Whoever allowed random people to e-mail the group was a complete fool.
--
About six years ago, even before my company grew from just me, to me plus more, I removed the reply all button. Clients e-mail me every hour, and they often copy one of their colleagues. But they never want me to reply to those colleagues. One accidental click of the nearly-identical looking and nearly-identically labelled button adjacent to the reply button, and I'd get yelled at by a client, with every right to do so.
Don't need security solutions, add-ons, or weird shit. Just right-click customize toolbar, and remove the offensive button. That's enough. It can stay in the right-click menu, and it can remain a keyboard shortcut. You aren't stopping people from e-mailing with multiple recipients. You're just making them realize that they shouldn't.
Oh yeah, and the company policy that says no employee should ever ever ever reply to more than a single client address at a time. You know, 'cause a reply is to the author. You can't "reply" to another recipient. That's not english.
There is nothing short of the motherfucking Declaration of Indefuckingpendence that requires an epistle from Sub Commander D. B. "Brotard" Stalin, SVP of Pointless Bullshit to be sent out to all 50,129 drones in the first place, opening the door to using Reply-All.
Seriously, corporate email on mass-distro is spam, trash it.
Posting AC. The Nielsen RTA policy came suspiciously soon after a big RTA gaff. Something to the effect of "Who are you, who is your boss, and why are you sending me this?" from someone high up the food chain, who RTAed this message to a majority of the employees. Of course this came wrapped in a pretty bow of "efficiency,etc." but a lot of us couldn't help but giggle.
Now here's where it gets better. Nielsen uses Exchange. And the menu is disabled, as is the button, however the hotkey still works (Control-Shift-R). It's even presented in the greyed out menu. Of course everyone now uses the hotkey because the the efficiency of REMOVING unnecessary recipients is much faster than adding back all the necessary people that were CCed. At least in theory, but for the most part people just Control-Shift-R, type, send.
Putting all concerns about having a cluttered, but complete, inbox that can be searched for answers versus tighter distribution groups and more delays in having to query actual people for answers aside, if you ask me, paying someone a six figure salary to write memos about the proper use of the "Reply All" button and paying IT staff to monkey with email software to remove it is pretty much the definition of bureaucracy and inefficiency gone wild.
really? you have to remove the reply-all feature because your paid employees are not smart enough to know when and when not to use it? Fire your HR staff and training staff now!
Which is more efficient? Training your entire staff not to cause a frivolous waste of time (which will waste time and seem frivolous to the majority of users who aren't a problem) or have a handful of IT guys disable the feature in software?
Bonus question: What would you think of a company that actually forced you to go through training that included an admonishment about not using reply all? What about all the other stuff they'd use to fill any class that covered something so nit-picky as that?
This is what mail filter rules are for. Generally, unsolicited mail to lots of people can be put into a low priority folder. You can send an auto-reply to let the sender know.
> In addition to getting rid of the annoying 'Thanks!'
What's wrong with "thanks" emails? If I help someone I'd like to be thanked, if not I'll save myself the trouble next time.
Just what I was thinking actually. At a company I used to work for, people were in the habit of sending round Excel spreadsheets as attachments to everyone in the whole department (over 100 people). I dread to think how much of a headache that must have been for the mail server admins. Surely it would have made more sense to run an NNTP server and create a newsgroup for each department.
However it contains a lot of common sense and most is applicable accross jurisdictions.
http://www.out-law.com/page-5536
Now if only we could have proper inline quoting and proper message threading - like the mail clients of the 90s before Outlook became dominant. Outlook makes inline responses hard, at least once you get past the first person to do it, which can be a pain in discussion. Top-posting must waste a lot of storage space.
You can't easily use internal distibution lists if you are replying to external addresses, opposing counsel, etc. Our company has been using PayneGroup's Outlook Send Assistant which has eliminated the problem without banning the Reply All feature, which can be useful at times.
Don't ever become a DBA. Computers exist to make the logical and rational rules we can't expect humans to follow. The GRANT command isn't just a substitute for computer etiquette.
I wish Google Wave hadn't died a premature death. It had pretty much all the desirable features of Reply-All (groups of users form ad-hoc as necessary with no administrative overhead) and all the desirable features of mailing lists (opt-in/opt-out and history).
In addition to getting rid of the annoying 'Thanks!' and 'Welcome!' emails
These are not annoying (unless used in reply-to all emails ofcourse).
They are even necessary I'd say. Now I use the thanks emails often, not to the coworker sitting across from me, but to people in other countries, coworkers you don't get to see often, or when I asked for something that isn't their normal task, something difficult, something that deserves a pat on the back.
It helps to be kind and nice to people certainly when your not the VP,CEO or whatever at the company. People will help you and you can get things done because of it, not through fear but through positive feedback.
I tend to have the opposite problem: You send an e-mail to 5 people on your team, some reply directly, some to 'All' and you spend your time adding people (and their comments) back into a common thread so everybody is on the same page.