Reply All FAIL of the Day

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We've all done it at some point in our lives, accidentally hitting the "reply all" button but this guy has probably set a record. The story claims that, including the initial 1.3 million e-mail originally sent, the grand total of replies and request to be taken off the list drove the e-mail total to 186 million from one "reply all" message. Whoops.

On Monday, NHS staff complained on Twitter about a “test email” sent by an IT contractor at Croydon NHS to everyone in the organisation, as well as replies to all in response to the message, leading to claims that the entire email system had crashed. One health service statistician estimated that at least 186m emails, including replies to all asking to be taken off the distribution list, had been sent, clogging up people’s inboxes. NHS digital said 840,000 accounts were affected.
 
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Armenius said:
One of the reasons I stare at my e-mails for 5 minutes after composing them is to avoid things like this. The other is to make sure I don't sound like a jackass to the recipients :whistle:.
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That's what I do too. Maybe not stare for 5 minutes but I do what almost no one else in cooperate America does: proof read. Not just for things like typos and grammar but to make sure my message is clear and coherent.
 
You have to screw up twice to do this. Hit 'Reply All' and then 'Send'.

Good Billable Time.
 
The way around this is

To: [email protected]
CC: ----
BCC: Everyone

That ways when someone inevitably hits Reply-All it only sends it back to you. Problem solved. Whenever there's a corp wide email spam that needs to be sent, that's how I do it, and how I instruct users to do it (only a select few people can send to the everyone group anyways).
 
If only there was an OK box that said something like are you sure you want to send this email to EVERYONE?
 
charold said:
The way around this is

To: [email protected]
CC: ----
BCC: Everyone

That ways when someone inevitably hits Reply-All it only sends it back to you. Problem solved. Whenever there's a corp wide email spam that needs to be sent, that's how I do it, and how I instruct users to do it (only a select few people can send to the everyone group anyways).
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The issue is in some Outlook versions BCC doesn't appear by default. You have to hit additional keys to get it to appear and most people don't know about it. They're also the same assholes who send group instead of muli-recipient texts. I hate getting 20+ texts from a conversation that I have nothing to do with, but they have to inform someone in IT about it, and I just magically got selected.
 
Sonicks said:
That's what I do too. Maybe not stare for 5 minutes but I do what almost no one else in cooperate America does: proof read. Not just for things like typos and grammar but to make sure my message is clear and coherent.
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DrLobotomy said:
Corporate
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:D I laughed at that one. :) Please don't edit.

It's a non-serious forum, so we don't care. It's still funny. :) (please don't go correct all of my posts!)
 
Who on earth doesn't enable send/delivery restrictions on a group of that size? Someone needs to swat their admins over the head.
 
If you read the actual article the guy at the start wasn't the issue, it was the fuckers that received the email. One person sent out a test email to 1.3 million people. Ok.. a tad excessive but that is only a single email. From that point everyone started doing reply all to it asking to be removed from the list. Those fuckers are what brought it from 1.2 million to almost 200 million. I would place the blame on the end users not the system admin.
 
Where I work, I set it up so only 12 or so people can email the entire company. Their exchange admin has been seriously lax in this.
 
charold said:
The way around this is

To: [email protected]
CC: ----
BCC: Everyone

That ways when someone inevitably hits Reply-All it only sends it back to you. Problem solved. Whenever there's a corp wide email spam that needs to be sent, that's how I do it, and how I instruct users to do it (only a select few people can send to the everyone group anyways).
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Now you're the asshole who broke my filter that auto deletes those messages automatically, because nobody got to your email and there are now 200 forks, of which you're one of them.

If someone forgets to lock down senders on a large distribution list and some tool causes an email storm, at this point I've accepted "you're not going to get to use email today." Even the well-intentioned just contribute to make it last longer.
 
Tawnos said:
Now you're the asshole who broke my filter that auto deletes those messages automatically, because nobody got to your email and there are now 200 forks, of which you're one of them.

If someone forgets to lock down senders on a large distribution list and some tool causes an email storm, at this point I've accepted "you're not going to get to use email today." Even the well-intentioned just contribute to make it last longer.
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I like to join in just for the lols :) same with group texts.
 
Exavior said:
If you read the actual article the guy at the start wasn't the issue, it was the fuckers that received the email. One person sent out a test email to 1.3 million people. Ok.. a tad excessive but that is only a single email. From that point everyone started doing reply all to it asking to be removed from the list. Those fuckers are what brought it from 1.2 million to almost 200 million. I would place the blame on the end users not the system admin.
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Still starters fault for not using BBC. i never send mass e-mail to anyone without using BBC. It's also a courtesy in regards to privacy.

I once got one of those email wher eit was just send to an ass long list of recipients from a friend. I quickly did a respond all and told people to stop using this behavior because it makes it easy to do this.... Then i attached a picture of a girl getting ramed by a dog.
I never received any e-mails like that again...
 
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Since my work decided to go all in with MS Outlook 365 web client I absolutely hate that after an update or two some time back that reply was changed to default reply all.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Since my work decided to go all in with MS Outlook 365 web client I absolutely hate that after an update or two some time back that reply was changed to default reply all.
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o_O

Maybe its a plan to easy you into their email content "telemetry". First get you used to send all, then they become just a part of all...
 
Am I the only.one who wished that Reply all was used more often? I'll have a chain going with all the stakeholders and some questions for each, but have an impact on what everyone is doing. And half the people reply only to me.
 
CombatChrisNC said:
Am I the only.one who wished that Reply all was used more often? I'll have a chain going with all the stakeholders and some questions for each, but have an impact on what everyone is doing. And half the people reply only to me.
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I hope in these instances you reply to their emails and copy everyone else back in.

Usually people respond to you, and you, only when they don't want the group to see what they chimed in with.....or maybe in your instance they are too busy fussing about their day and are replying to emails with their phone (which does not default to reply all).

Reply all is usually extremely useful. Where it breaks is when the Exchange (or whatever) admin decides to make one single distro that hits 80% of the company with the other 20% hiding in maybe one or two other distros or even worse, one single distro that hits everyone. It gets waaaaaay worse when the distribution list names are easy to guess as well and auto-fill [alt+k in Outlook] helps with the rest (because most people don't know how to use the address book).
 
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I love when people at my work reply all with "Remove me from this list" and then others follow suit with +1 and crap.
 
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