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.

Big teams meeting. Mentimeter to capture anonymous input on any negative aspects of directorate culture (there were a few ‘toxics’ appearing up there). A swallowed hard and posted my anonymous comment. In my name in the teams chat. Hey ho ..

And don’t get me started on running multiple simultaneous chats, to bad mouth folks on the other chats. You’d think I’d have learned by now…

My “reply all” finally resulted in me losing my job after about 4 years of repercussions and ‘politics’.

I wrote nothing but simple truths; “I have left them three voicemails and have sent them four emails over the last ten days. So far they have not responded. I am starting to think they don’t exist”.

“They” were on copy and thought they were more senior than me. Their boss (their affair partner and also on copy) was very slightly more senior than me.

Those 4 years were tough at times.

A senior manager landed me in it. Asked me in a briefing to let him know why we shouldn’t be doing a particular partnership venture, so I sent an email detailing why this didn’t add up financially and distracted from our key goals, etc etc. Fairly carefully worded but very clear. Anyway he writes his message to very senior folk that it wasn’t viable and we were pulling out. He hadn’t deleted my notes.  We’ve since been told we are going to explore options at great cost then they will decide to pull out later.

Almost to painful to tell

Top boss emails me asking about colleagues personal circumstances

The only thing i do right is keep the email professional

I send email cc to middle boss

She runs in. I haven’t sent the email top boss i have sent it to colleague. We mess about trying to recall email unsuccessful

Now at this I’m a Standard idiot. Colleague isn’t that pleased but not that annoyed

When my boss has walked in i was making a video with screen recorder and microphone. Some how i managed to upload the whole saga to youtube.

Luckily a very kind person told me quietly and discretely what I’d done and the video was deleted.

I like it when you’re in a conversation with a customer or supplier and they copy someone else from their company in. Only for it to snowball in to a massive internal argument with you still copied in. This has happened to me twice recently with two large companies. Sad, yet exciting, when a new addition to the thread pops up in your inbox! Great to confirm that other businesses are equally as dysfunctional as your own.

Many years ago I drafted an email for my boss to send to all of our organisation’s regional directors about a potential upcoming ‘situation’ that could have a negative impact on the public perception of the organisation (I can’t even remember what it was now).

As part of the task i’d had to find all of the names and email addresses of said directors.

So the email went something like:

Hi Boss, here’s a draft email for you to send out to all the directors… blah, blah, blah.

Of course i’d found all the email addresses searching in the cc box and forgotten to delete them when i sent the email to the boss, so they all got the email direct from me anyway.

We only get email storms occasionally (once every year or two) but with 90k employees globally they’re pretty spectacular when they do happen. Usually starts with someone in HR (or one of the few other positions with permission to email the full distribution list) accidentally sending something out that only applies to a few people then you get a blitz of people replying to all along the lines of “why are you sending me this?!”, followed by an avalanche of “stop replying to all, you’re just making it worse!” or “please stop including me in this!!” and then a few managers that think they’re important sending out “everyone stop replying to all immediately!”.  And then as another time zone comes online it restarts…

Two spring to mind. One where a colleague had handed in her notice and then, meaning to message a friend, accidentally messaged the whole team saying how much she hated us all.

The other was a chap who meant to send a funny link to a trusted colleague, but instead sent it to the entire operation, offices, contractors the lot. I didn’t dare open the link, all I know was his desk was cleared and he was gone by lunchtime.

A department of our company suggests setting up a two minute delay on sent emails, just as a potential safety net for this very thing.

Someone quit work to travel in Asia. Sent an email to one of our team to keep in touch and show off pics and included something along the lines “Is (boss) still a ****?”

Colleague circulates the email round the team to share the pics. Boss not happy.

Not a “reply all”, but someone in HR once inadvertently posted all the email addresses (about 1700 of them) in a confidential email circular regarding a pension issue that affected a subgroup of the staff. How? Well let’s just say CC is not the same as BCC!  That was a hard lesson day.

OP – agreed. Also the ‘did you mean to attach something’ reminder is pretty poor. Lots of false positives. And many misses.

MS Outlook/exchange has gotten worse in its ability and performance imo. I think email would be much better if we returned to CLI SMTP.

MS Outlook/exchange has gotten worse in its ability and performance imo

+1.

It has some sort of AI feature where it suggests that I can start my reply with “That’s awesome, thanks!” or “Great stuff!” or other **** business speak, it offers the option to “correct” all my grammar and re-write my email more concisely but it doesn’t say:
“hold on one sec before I send this – just check that cc and bcc field”
or
“wait a minute, the email was sent by JOHN Smith but you’ve typed JANE Smith into the reply field, are you sure?”

I had a potentially career ending one. I’ll tame it down…..

A young me was an IT Project Manager working for a large multinational investment bank….it was quite a high pressure job and the business we looked after was the Treasury and Markets. Head of the business was a lady who was incredibly difficult to work with, very direct and quite shouty. IT down time caused lots of lost revenue and we were seen as a nuisance. We had a Bloomberg update to do to all of the desktops (they had Bloomberg cards in the desktops)….

Leading up to the upgrade the Business Manager gave me an incredibly difficult time, was awful to work with, but we finally agreed a suitable time to complete the work.

Anyway my lead technical guy did the upgrade for the dept, it went really well. Next morning everything was working fine, I get a nice email from the Business Manager saying what a good job the team had done…..

I did a reply to him but hit reply all…..asking the team lead what he did during the night to put the old battle axe in a good mood……

She replied……And thankfully saw the funny side.

I was massively lucky that she saw the funny side, and massively lucky that I wasn’t as rude as I could have been.

I have learned my lesson though. Anything on email or Teams is purely something I would repeat in court.

Our internal Outlook has a warning banner if the recipient (or expanded distros) goes above 50 individuals.

There’s C250000 people in the org though so we still get the occasional muppet.

have learned my lesson though. Anything on email or Teams is purely something I would repeat in court.

This. An old boss has a simple guide: never say anything that would embarrass you if printed in the local paper.

Not a reply all, but allowing everyone access to whole company distribution lists…..

Worked for a dysfunctional ad agency who had a terrible hire and fire track record

At least once a week the MD would send an email to everyone letting them know who had been let go “because he/she wasn’t a good fit”.

After I discovered I apparently wasn’t a good fit – one of my team (having a new job to go to) emailed the same whole organisation list to say that “she was letting the organisation go because the agency wasn’t a good fit” which resulted in rapid ejection, but much hilarity amongst everyone else

Having read through this thread, I can only thank any deities who may be out there and paying attention that I never found myself doing a job that involved getting anywhere close to this sort of shitstorm happening! I’m fine with graphics and photoshop, stuff like that, but put anything else that involves communication in front of me, and there’s no telling what might happen!

Well, actually, quite a lot, it seems.

have learned my lesson though. Anything on email or Teams is purely something I would repeat in court.

Or in a Freedom of Info request. Luckily for me, decades of circumlocution and back covering meant my feedback going on the meeting chat instead of the anonymous website caused a moment’s cold sweat and took a bit of laughing off (folks did laugh), but  it was actually pretty bland and let me say at the time and subsequently “well everyone knows what I think about that…”. To the extent it could almost have been strategic.

Could have been so much worse. As I said in one of the other teams chats I had running in the meeting… Living dangerously

As I said in one of the other teams chats I had running in the meeting… Living dangerously

Teams chats can be very dangerous. Worst one is a message popping up on your screen while you’re in a meeting – a simple red dot of “I’m in a meeting” does not prevent the message boxes popping up so if someone sends a message while you’re sitting there with your boss with you both looking at the laptop, it could be embarrassing at best and career ending at worst – for you or the person sending the message!

Similarly sitting there in a meeting and trying to run a simultaneous chat on another channel – get that wrong and whatever you’re typing will go to everyone in the meeting rather than your mate…

An FE college I worked for many years ago had a tutor in the Construction dept who obviously struggled to realise he wasn’t on-site anymore. There was an option on the email recipient dropdown list for ‘all staff’. Apparently Mr Neanderthal decided to send an email with a VERY dodgy attachment, but as he typed in the list of intended recipients he inadvertently included the all staff option, and then sent it.

Every computer in the large open-plan staff room started making the ’email received’ noise, and then one-by-one the staff started putting their heads over the partitions, meerkat style, to state that they found it very inappropriate, and what the hell did he think he was doing etc.

The sender took about 10 seconds to realise what he’d done and then about 30 minutes trying to recall the email. His IT skills were at best rudimentary.

I think he was no stranger to HR thereafter.

A complicated story but one with scarring marital consequences.
I think you need to start with this.

After my wife first qualified as a GP she got a job working at the local Out of Hours GP service. She forward to me an email from her new boss regarding a complaint, no patient confidentiality but it was still a work matter that didn’t involve me. Anyway, I replied setting out in great detail what an idiot I thought her boss was, how my wife shouldn’t worry as this job was only a springboard to next post and I may have also referred to her boss having a gunt. As soon as I hit send I realised by wife hadn’t actually forwarded me the email, she had instead included it as an attachment, which I had opened and replied to, therefore replying directly to her boss.

As I frantically tried slamming the recall buttons, I got an email from her boss telling me I was too late to recall it.

I feel sick just thinking about it.