Intra-company "reply to all" never ending e-mails

so many of you who work for large companies have probably already experienced this:

someone sends an e-mail to a massive e-mail distribution list like "All Employees",

one person sends a reply with some stupid comment like "please take me off this distribution list" - using "Reply to All"

then another one does it,

then another,

soon, there are 1000s of e-mails going around, mostly people saying "please do not hit 'Reply to All'!" ... and they of course did themselves hit "Reply to All".

cycle repeat...

so, is this:
- a fun distraction in the office?
- a frustrating waste of time?
- a public display of human stupidity?
- an expensive waste of time and money? (remember, many people heve their e-mails sent to their mobile device)
- a clear example of bad IT systems?

- or just a silly thing?

We just had a person do the exact same thing aboot 5 mins ago. I think it's on the 15 cycle now..

Ye work for Infineon/Qimonda in Campeon too eh ? Personally I like getting emails. As they have all the same subject you can easily select them all and recycle them

My favourite was was when I was in India. I had to send a big PP presentation back to UK through a very slow, roaming mobile connection. It took two and a half hrs to send.
When I got my e-mails back later that evening the secretary had replied with history - Thanks - another two and a half hrs. DOH!

shouldn't a modern e-mail system be able to detect such things and then stop the cycle?

or have a feature / setting on an e-mail that does not allow a reply to all?

also note this advice for the future:
- if you accidentally do hit "reply all" and are working on a MS Enterprise e-mail system, do NOT try to recall the message (as one of my co-workers once tried). Everyone got a second message notifing them of the recall, and then he got over 3000 confirmations of his recall.

yup, has happened where I work too!
a guy had a housewarming party & used the wrong DL!

You can always send the e-mail BCC, then its not possible to reply to all ...

Computers will only ever do what the users ask them to. So in basic fact, the user selects reply to all, who's the idiot, the computer for doing what is asked of it, or the user, not reading, looking or thinking about what they do.

We also have huge distribution lists, but as stated above, using BCC means its not possible to reply to all. So in the last year, this is how its all done now.

At our work, there is no distribution list for All Employees. At least not one that anyone can send to. There are a lot of smaller distribution lists for individual departments though but everyone knows everyone in their department and arent likely to send any "please unsubscribe me" emails.

Computers do what people tell them to, and people tell them to do all sorts of crazy things, but thats no excuse for the morons in IT to not do their job properly. These sorts of things dont need to be an issue, if they are they are easily fixed, and if they arent fixed, then someone at IT needs a hiding.

It would not be unreasonable to ask Outlook or Notes or whatever to have a built-in "Do you really want to annoy this many people?" check for emails going to more than, say, 25 or 50 people. Additionally, emails to company-wide dist lists could go first to admin or manager who then must approve release of the message.

It would be nice if there was a function "you cannot reply to this mail".

yea, just like how airlines handle your luggage.

Old joke:
a guy goes to the airport and checks-in for his flight. the ticket agent asks for his final destination and if he has bags to check.

he says: "well, I'm flying to New York, but I want this bag to go to Boston, this one to Chicago, and this one to Miami."

the agent say: "I'm sorry sir, but I'm afraid we can't do that."

he says: "why not, you did it last week?"

A couple of years ago the German service manager in our company handed
out T-shirts with text something like:

"I did NOT take part in the global mail-storm 200x"

aahh ssooo, that's what their called..


source: http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2...&i=46520,00.asp

Ah yes. The good old reply to all... Great function that is. Especially when a client is added on to the distribution list after a while by a stupid account manager and she sends the entire discussion to him by accident. This is especially good when the discussion is basically saying what a stupid, whinging git he is... Oh how I laughed

One of my former co-workers got sick of the amount of crap that was being sent to all@company.com, and started sending piss-taking reply-to-alls under an assumed name. When they found out who was doing it he almost got fired.

The amount of emails to all@company.com did reduce afterwards though, so at least some benefit came of it.

Heh funniest story I have about mailing lists, was the golden key society at our uni (for special students that get all As, and have hobbies, and do community service or some horrid shit like that) , that a couple of the other kiwis i came over here with were on, and it was open access, anyone could send to it. So we emailed it to golden-shower@... putting the golden-key@... in the Bcc, and making up all this hilarious stuff as if we were a golden shower mailing list and the wires were getting crossed, and making up events involving our old lecturers etc.

Caused quite a drama! But we got about 3 weeks worth of fun in until they closed it off.

At my university, our email addresses was simply our enrolment number, so there wasn't any obvious way of telling who sent the email apart from looking at the sender's name. Which could quite easily be changed in the settings. Quite a few people were sending emails under different people's names -- assuming the receiver just presses "reply", the reply wasn't going to the person they thought it was...

Some silly wank in head office has just sent an e-mail to 20 distribution lists containg over 1000 e-mail adresses!

Wow are the mails coming in thick and fast! I cannot delete them quick enough to all of the 'reply to all' telling the originator to politely F off