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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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Just remember, if you make something idiot proof, they will build a better idiot.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
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.
Something like: Are you sure you want to send to 2047 people?
An even better approach would be for the software to present each of those 2047 recipients to the sender in a popup asking "Do you want to send this to ______?", with the "No" button selected by default. So they have to press the "Yes" button 2047 times. Actually, making "Yes" the default would even be useful, if managers insist on it, since they'd still have to hit Return 2047 times.
Years ago, when email was first rising to the business world's consciousness, and I saw a company ask us (a software house that had supplied their email package) if we could do this. I had the fun of implementing it (a 15-minute job), and I saw a lot of "THANK YOU!!!!" messages from the client's people. I've never understood why later email packages didn't pick up on this simple idea. The software is always harrassing users with such verification popups; why not use them in a case where it will actually affect company productivity? ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.