RubeRad

I just got treated to a fantastic Reply-All Storm. Some new-hire (according to the content of Email Zero) sent an email to a distribution list with thousands of employees on it, and I (and all those thousands of others) got over 150 emails in the next five minutes, about evenly split between "Take me off this list" and "Stop replying all!".

One superstar sent four messages of the form "You've got the wrong Mary Smith, forwarding to Mary L Smith". My favorite was a single word: "Promoted". This meme also got some play:



Why doesn't Outlook have a feature where, if an email draft is about to be sent to large lists, it gives an escalating series of warnings/confirmations? (100 recipients: "Are you sure you want to send to N? OK/Cancel" 1000 recipients "I know you just clicked OK, but do you REALLY want to send this? ..."

Or simple pattern recognition (N reply-alls per second containing the word "remove" or "stop") to block a growing reply-all storm in its tracks?

Any of you got any good reply-all stories?

mtnbud

When I was teaching my favorite reply all snafu's happened when someone mistakenly sent a complaint about key lime pie being stolen out of a staff fridge to everyone in the entire school district. This email was sent to over 4000 people. The # of people who hit "reply all" to ask to be taken off the list was comical.

RubeRad

lol whatever mailing list is sending me emails about key lime pie, I wanna stay on that list!

billridesbikes

At least corporate has a list for the next RIF!

maddmaxx 

Outlook should not correct this as it's Darwinism at work.

Squeeze

No, but I hope to read more in this thread.

I always laugh when these occur and make sure not to join in the fun. Nothing good can come from participating.



Exactly.

Kat12

You forgot all of the ones who reply with, "Why am I getting this?" or "I think you sent this to the wrong person."

I've been caught in a few of those at work. I usually create a filter "rule" to just send it all straight to the trash.


Not me. Clearly by that time you're way too late, as someone else beat you to stealing the pie. (Unless, of course, it was you... in which case, there's no need for an email because you already know...)

indyfabz

Several years ago our department’s admin sent an email to everyone in the department about arranging a dinner for an employee who was about to retire. One recipient replied to all, saying something like “I hope it’s not at one of those ethnic places.” I don’t think he meant to do that.

RubeRad

Yikes! 'several years ago' that would be considered merely rude, nowadays that's enough to get you fired some places. BUT let's nip the P&R in the bud and not chase that rabbit trail

On a more positive note, I'd be more likely to chime in "I hope we go to something interesting and ethnic, I'm tired of TGI Fridays and the like"

Darth Lefty 

I used to work for the Navy (a civilian employee) and during that time in the 2000's they instituted a service-wide network and email system, replacing the hundreds that had sprouted up at local bases prior to Y2K. If you think your company is large, you might not have any idea how many people are in, or working for, the Navy. I often received emails to all the dozens of Darth Lefties saying something like, "If you are the Darth Lefty who left your Zip drive at Point Mugu..."

DiabloScott

I think I've sent out ONE global email in three years with current company. It was a legit reason. Then I got hundreds of "out of office" responses.. PITFA.

J.Higgins 

Funny I should be reading this thread just now. My wife and I have been on vacation for the last three days. Last night she said that she has over 1000 emails in her inbox at work, and wasn't looking forward to going through them. This morning she claims to have "accidentally" deleted them. I believe it was an accident. Even though she is the head of IT where she works, and certainly has the skills not to do anything by accident, she's just not that type of person who'd delete her stuff and put her hands in the air and say oh well. She would have gone through every single one, because that's who she is. Me? Oh, I'd have done a quick scan just to see if anything had caught on fire, and dumped those s-o-b's.

Zinger

I commonly delete phone calls and text not on my contact list. Saves me a lot of wasted time with salesmen.

And I never read messages at work. Deleted those too. I don't know what good could ever have come of reading them but listening to coworkers who did pretty much verified that nothing very important was missed.

Kat12

I would do like you-- but that's because of those 1000 emails, probably *at least* half to three-quarters would be "such-and-such system I don't use is going to be down" or "so-and-so will be out of the office so if you need something, this other so-and-so will be in charge" and "there's a power outage at this office nowhere near you where you don't communicate with anyone anyway so don't try to call" & etc. etc.... another hundred or so would probably be someone emailing me about some issue and someone else replying having taken care of it... a few about "hey here's info about policies that you might find marginally useful or maybe not you but other people might"... etc.

Seattle Forrest

I got about a thousand emails that say something like "DON'T REPLY ALL" today. Something about CPR training. I work from home.

DiabloScott

I know this is a zombie butt...

I fell for a company fake phishing email the other day. Our IT department sends them out once in a while to see how vulnerable we are and if we click on a link we get a "yer busted" page and auto signed up for more training. Thing is, they REALLY made it look like it was coming from my boss and included way more specific info than most phishing emails do, and I read it on my company phone so I didn't see all the usual signs like "real" links with fake names, mouse hovering kind of clues.

So I convinced them to include phone specific phishing scam training in the program... but it was a righteous bust.

Seattle Forrest

I feel for one of those at Microsoft. It was branded perfectly, about the product I worked on, and seemed "important" in a "I need to do this" kind of way. Ok, fool me once. I got an email recently at my current job about my password expiring, yeah I've seen this movie before, I know to ignore this and waste a day with IT if I get locked out. Don't think that's what they were going for...

genec

I once worked at a place that had an extensive FAQ list for new hires that ultimately gave instructions on how to be removed from the "newbie" list. If you could not remove yourself... It was a sign of your failure.

"I don't know... the guy is still on newbie.all..."

RubeRad

My company does that too, and they've set up a specific email address for us to forward all suspected phishing attempts ('forward-as-attachment'), and they use that for dealing with legit threats and tracking the training spoofs.

Well one of my cow-orkers (smartest programmer I know), figured out that when the company sends out the spoof phishes for training, they include something like 'Phishing-training' in the SMTP metadata that doesn't get displayed. So he created an Outlook rule to check for that, skip the inbox, forward-as-attachment to the right address, and he's never seen an internal spoof phish email since. I sometimes wonder if the guy at IT who sends that out is ever like 'Wow, dude forwarded this back in like 3 sec AGAIN -- he is so on top of his email!'

Hondo Gravel

When my Hispanic friends call me pinche whiteboy or other playful terms I say whatever ethnic just hit my funny bone because it is prevalent in S Texas and nobody gets offended.

indyfabz

Thing is, the guy who replied is of Italian descent. When he retired they had a dinner for him at Italian restaurant. Pretty "ethnic" in my book.

SkinGriz

Did you get your TPS report in on time?

SkinGriz

So glad I don’t have that kind of job!!

My father in law was some type of senior management at a large MNC.

I think I read in Personal MBA that management in a place like that spends 80% of their time in meetings.

One day I ask my FIL, “So, you go to a lot of meetings?”

”Oh yea, lots of meetings.”

Me, “Do you have to go to meetings about your meetings?”

I figured after that question I’d quit while I was ahead.

RubeRad

I'm pretty fortunate, I've been able to retain a mostly technical role (i.e. I still get to write software) and probably only have to deal with about 4hr of meetings a week

SkinGriz

Knowing a language that tells computers what to do seems really cool.

My imagination makes me believe it’s akin to an extremely in depth ladder logic, but I have no frame of reference.