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."

Comments

asking for trouble

[bigdavex]

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."'

I hope somebody replied to all, quoting this entire memo and putting "OK" at the bottom.

Re:asking for trouble

[MightyMartian]

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."'

I hope somebody replied to all, quoting this entire memo and putting "OK" at the bottom.

Ok

Can we get rid of long sigs as well?

[Br00se]

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.

Re:Can we get rid of long sigs as well?

[KiloByte]

Right, but do you know what happens if you send a plain text e-mail to a business person? They'll print it out, highlight a few places with a color marker, add comments in pen, scan it, put the image into a Word document then send it to you with a subject of "Sending e-mail message" (apparently Word's default subject, might be translated differently in English versions).

The first time I received a mail like this, I hoped this is a joke done on purpose. After seeing this multiple times from different people from far away parts of the country, from different business sectors, I think I really don't want to live on this planet anymore.

Fix the people not the tool!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Fix the people not the tool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely correct. Too often, managers will try to address the symptom of a problem rather than the underlying problem. Dealing with staff issues is hard, it is easier to skip it and come up bad policies. This kind of avoidance destroys a good work environment. I use reply-all regularly, but responsibly. Rather than get rid of the feature or severely limit it, deal with the individuals that abuse it. Or maybe hire competent office workers and managers -- but that might be too much to ask.

Feature/Bug in Outlook

[BlackPignouf]

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 work at Nielsen ... it doesn't work.

[bramankp]

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.

Re:Mailing lists

[aztracker1]

Just remember, if you make something idiot proof, they will build a better idiot.

Re:please

[sortius_nod]

Yet again corps can't see the forest for the trees. The tool (reply-all) isn't the problem, it's the people using it. Most companies don't train their staff well enough (or at all) in computer etiquette, maybe start there.