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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."
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.
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.
The majority of reply-alls can be replaced by using mailing lists.
+1. The lack of real (archived, opt-in) mailing lists is part of what drives useless reply-all usage. Let workers who are interested in topic Foo look at the archives for the Foo mailing list, decide if they like it, and sign up if they do.
At my workplace we're going even more retro. On Monday I'm going to sign up on the internal IRC network, and try to convince others to do the same. Our Enterprisey IM software simply doesn't support the way we work (when it works at all, that is).
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.
I think you misunderstood the article. They are not talking of removing the reply-all button entirely. They are mainly talking about putting a security to make sure people don't reply to everybody without realizing it. In other word, they want to make reply all more difficult than reply. It is the office equivalent of --i-understand-that-glxgears-is-not-a-benchmarking-tool
One of the things that can be done is restrict who can send to certain distribution lists. i.e. If you have something important enough to send to the entire student body or staff you have to basically send the original e-mail to a designated person and they send it "on behalf of x"
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
The majority of mailing lists can now be replaced by internal company-only social engines. My company (14K people approximately) switched to Socialcast and the amount of email lists related traffic and reply-all problems virtually disappeared. I generally HATE social networking, but this particular system when properly implemented can really be a game changer in the dynamics of internal communications.
With Microsoft's NoReplyAll add-in with Exchange a user can disable reply-all (or forward) on a per-message basis. That page has links to the documentation on how to do it.