Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The NHS's 1.2 Million Employees Are Trapped in a 'Reply-All' Email Thread (businessinsider.com)

Posted by msmash on from the reply-all dept.

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."

4 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. I survived by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I survived Bedlam DL3

    The story of when Microsoft themselves fell victim to the same issue, and how it was resolved.

  2. Re:Good ol' fun by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Emailing a group like that should have been limited to a very small number of people. Everyone else should have got a message that they were not authorized to use that email message.

    This is email server admin 101 level knowledge.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  3. Re:Really? by rgmoore · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It doesn't have to be of unlimited length. In Outlook/Exchange, at least, it's possible to have a distribution group that is handled by the server, so including the group name in the To: (or CC: or BCC:) field will send it to everyone in that group, no matter how big. My organization has a #Everyone group that does actually go to everyone. I don't know if #Everyone is protected, but there are certainly some very large distribution groups- around 1/3 of the organization- that anyone is allowed to send to.

    --

    There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  4. Re:Please remove by Yvan256 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    by Mycroft-X ( 11435 ) on 2016-11-14 10:22 (#53281043), Please remove me from this distribution, I don't know how I got on it.

    by aicrules ( 819392 ) on 2016-11-14 10:28 (#53281073), Sorry I don't own this distribution, please contact someone else.

    by Anonymous Coward on 2016-11-14 10:29 (#53281079), Remove me too please

    by Anonymous Coward on 2016-11-14 10:34 (#53281137), Can people stop replying to this. Thanks.

    by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on 2016-11-14 11:13 (#53281525), It's almost as if there's no way for the mail server to filter messages with more than a million recipients.

    by Anonymous Coward on 2016-11-14 10:34 (#53281139), To all! Please Stop Replying to All asking to be removed!

    by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on 2016-11-14 10:37 (#53281159), Please remove me from this list

    by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on 2016-11-14 10:30 (#53281097), Hey everyone, stop replying all! This is very annoying.

    by Anonymous Coward on 2016-11-14 10:36 (#53281153), Please remove me from this mailing list.

    by Anonymous Coward on 2016-11-14 10:44 (#53281229), OK - sorry.

    by Anonymous Coward on 2016-11-14 10:45 (#53281239), Why do I keep getting emails?

    by Jose ( 15075 ) on 2016-11-14 10:30 (#53281099), Me too!

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on 2016-11-14 10:34 (#53281133), unsubscribe

    by UPZ ( 947916 ) on 2016-11-14 10:42 (#53281209), GCHQ and NSA server CPU load must be spiking everytime an NHS employee hits 'reply all'.

    by PvtVoid ( 1252388 ) on 2016-11-14 10:47 (#53281253), Me too.

    by Anonymous Coward on 2016-11-14 10:56 (#53281355), Seriously though, in today's world, I am constantly surprised (although I shouldn't be anymore) by these chains that pop up routinely.

    by Anonymous Coward on 2016-11-14 11:09 (#53281475), I realize that there are a lot of stupid people in the world, but I'm not aware of any email clients where "reply all" is the default behavior.

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on 2016-11-14 11:14 (#53281535), People, please! Stop asking to be removed, it doesn't work that way!

    Stop using "reply all" you idiots! It's only making things worst!

    And I have also found a limit on the number of nested blockquotes we can do on Slashdot so I had to simplify my reply and make it un-nested blockquotes otherwise it would not accept my reply with a "Your comment has too few characters per line" warning! My joke has been ruined!