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The NHS's 1.2 Million Employees Are Trapped in a 'Reply-All' Email Thread (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Business Insider report:The NHS's 1.2 million employees are currently trapped in a "reply-all" email hell. A "test" email was accidentally sent to everyone who works at the UK health service - prompting a series of reply-all responses from annoyed recipients going out to all 1-million-plus employees of the organisations. An NHS employee told Business Insider that there have been at least 120 replies so far -- meaning that more than 140 million needless emails have been sent across the NHS's network today. As a result, they said, its email systems are running "very slow today." The NHS Pensions department is currently warning people on Twitter that "if contacting us by email please be aware that there may be delays in responding due to an issue currently affecting all NHS mail."
On the other hand, if you send an e-mail to a small group of people, e.g. trying to solve a problem together, it's very annoying if one or more people to use Reply instead of Reply-All, and the rest of the group misses part of the conversation.
It's almost as if there's no way for the mail server to filter messages with more than a million recipients.
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Yes, but you see, Mailman is an old-fashioned piece of software for an operating system that comes from the '70's.
Modern, advanced software from Microsoft (tm) will ensure emails will be delivered to everybody, under every circumstance.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
The problem is that mail clients don't know whether the "all@" mailing list email expands to five users or five million. As far as it is concerned, you're sending it to one address.
The correct solution is server-side, not client-side. Specify a policy that any mailing list with more than... say thirty people must have an authorized senders list, and must reject emails from anyone not on that list. That way, when someone responds to the "all@" list without a "Resent-From" header from someone on the authorized senders list, it will get dropped.
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