The Curse of the Reply All button

If I mention an attachment in an email, but fail to add an attachment, Outlook will prompt me before sending the email.

If I hit Reply All rather than Reply, Outlook could prompt me, “Oi, you are about to send this email to eleventy billion recipients, are you sure you want to do that?”. But, alas, no. Instead Outlook just quietly giggles at me and carries on.

Todays mistake wasn’t too bad, certainly not as bad as I when replied to my wifes new boss. A complicated story but one with scarring marital consequences.

Make me feel better by telling me about your email horror story.

A complicated story but one with scarring marital consequences.

I think you need to start with this.

FOR THE TEN THOUSANDTH TIME….I DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE BIRTHDAY CARD FOR DORIS IN ACCOUNTS OR THE FACT THAT JIM’S WIFE’S CAT HAD PUPPIES!!!!!!!!! AND NO, I’M NOT COMING TO THE CHRISTMAS PARTY SO STOP TELLING ME ABOUT IT.

I hate reply to all…I wonder how many hours of productivity is lost to deleting reply to all emails that have absolutely no relevance to the recipients, and were only sent so Bob, the lazy git, could make it look like he’s working and to cover his arse.*

*names may have been changed in case my work’s IT systems think i’m spilling corporate secrets

An accidental reply all is a mere starting point.  In my past life I was sometimes subcontracted to global organisations filled with people who will then ‘reply all’ to say why did you send me this and a whole load more who will ‘reply all’ to say will everyone please not reply all.  Email would be brought to it’s knees for a couple of hours 🙂

I always like the ten ‘reply all’ emails you always get from the usual suspects, caught up in the same chain of despair, where they insist on telling everyone else to stop clicking reply all and perpetuating the misery, seemingly unaware that they are very much a part of the problem…

The real issue of the reply all button is not actually reply all.

No. The real curse is when list of ‘all’ being replied to seems short enough but contains a very innocent (but incredibly sneaky) mailing list which happens to be the all company list. Obviously outlook does not do anything to expand this list so a perfectly innocent* (it not slightly sarcastic) reply about a bollocky change in company procedure gets sent to everyone. E v e r y o n e.

Posting for a friend…

* it wasn’t especially innocent but in my friends defense they did think the reply was going to their small team only.

I worked in Social Work / Social Care for years and I would estimate that 50% of all data breaches are as a result of reply all.

I worked in Social Work / Social Care for years and I would estimate that 50% of all data breaches are as a result of reply all.

Exacerbated by the people going “I’m just looping in* my colleague xxxx on this one” and then someone else cc’s their boss and before you know it a simple 2-person email has ballooned into something that now involves 15 people.
“Oh I’m not able to assist on this but I’ve included my colleague yyyy who is expert on it”.
/out of office from yyyy
“I’m covering for yyyy so I’ve cc’d my supervisor….”

* ‘looping in’ is up there with ‘reaching out’. It should be acceptable to terminate all correspondence immediately on seeing those phrases written down.

We had one of those all company mailing list reply all debacles not long back. It was hilarious and ended up with a guy losing his absolute s**t. I think it definitely triggered his ‘falling down’ moment which played out in the inboxes of nearly every one of the 1000’s of employees inboxes, all the way up to CEO level. This is in a US owned, Global Fortune 500 listed company for context.

Don’t think he works here any more.

We had one at work a while back where someone had mistakenly copied in DL with several hundred people on it. Obviously it meant nothing to loads and loads of people but instead of just deleting it hundreds of people kept ‘replying to all’ and saying please remove me from this DL. It went on and on and on for about a month.

* ‘looping in’ is up there with ‘reaching out’. It should be acceptable to terminate all correspondence immediately on seeing those phrases written down.

If any correspondance starts with ‘I’m just reaching out…” then I’m not reading past the first sentence

I’ve not experienced ‘looping in’ yet, but the same rule will apply

I the early days when the world was more innocent, I was replying to a mate via an internal email system about the fact that his team – Chelsea  had just been bought by Abromovich, and made the joke that his shirt sponsor would now be “www. Russian Bribes.com”  (see what I did there?)…anyway for reasons that still elude me, – I think some system set up, it translated  it into an actual hyper link…I sent the email, and the pop ups started, I tried to close everything, and still they came…eventually I literally just pulled the plug out of the socket…

A man from IT is running along the corridor towards my office, he is very angry, he goes to my boss’ office and I can see angry gestures through the windows. They both turn to look at me..Apparently it did quite a bit of damage. My boss (bless him) actually thought the joke was quite funny, and didn’t really do anything much other than wag his finger at me. IT didn’t think my joke was funny at all.

The real curse is when list of ‘all’ being replied to seems short enough but contains a very innocent (but incredibly sneaky) mailing list which happens to be the all company list.

Thats IT incompetence. All mailing lists above a certain size should be locked down.

I thought outlook does give a warning about number of recipients but that might only be direct people vs mailing lists.

What I find annoying are the long email chains which start off with a couple of people  that just snowball including more and more people. Including some whom earlier parts of the chain werent overly polite about.

They best one is when you have an IT ticket system that automatically creates a ticket from an email but the user has cc’d several email groups to be ‘helpfull’… People start replying to it and you then have an exponential number of tickets generated!

I thought outlook does give a warning about number of recipients but that might only be direct people vs mailing lists.

No, includes mailing list numbers too.

And your fix as a recipient in Outlook is right click-> Ignore

I was involved in running a club. The venue we hired from the local council started taking the mick with price rises, our treasurer shared the latest quote with the committee and I hit reply all and went off on a bit of a rant about how crap their service had been, all the things wrong with the facility, the fact that we’d been trying for ages to find a better venue and that we should probably try seeing if the press would be interested in a “local authority price gouging threatening club that provides valuable service to community” story.

I didn’t realise that the treasurer had included the council’s facility manager in the address list. That took a bit of smoothing over.