You've got Mail!

[plonq]

It was an honest, if somewhat stupid mistake; somebody scanned in a personal document, then forwarded it to the concerned parties. Unfortunately, when he entered the email addresses, he accidentally included a company-wide distribution list with a couple of hundred recipients.

I like to think that I did what most people would do in this situation; I took a quick look,realized that it was not meant for me, and promptly filed it in the trash because mistakes happen.

Then the early shift arrived at the head office, and the first reply showed up. It was somebody who hit Reply All and said, "I just want you to know that I got this in error, and I have deleted the message."

Fair enough. IMO he did not need to do a reply to all for that, but this should have been the end of it, right?

"I deleted it too."
"Me too."
"Likewise."

This went on for fourteen replies before one of our superintendents out east jumped in and said, "PLEASE STOP REPLYING TO ALL WITH THESE INANE MESSAGES."

Whether it was because all of the really stupid people had finished checking their messages, or that they took his words to heart, this stemmed the flow of the messages...

...until the next shift came in to work an hour later and they started up again.

I think the "Reply All" button should pop up a disclaimer that they have to click away - something like, "Selecting this option may disqualify you from any computer-related jobs after this message goes out. Are you sure you want to reply to ALL?"

Comments

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

But I get a +5% stat bonus from mail.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Ahahaha. I was working at Microsoft when some bright spark sent an email to one of the many mystery lists that new hires would get automatically signed into, saying "Hi I'm new, I'm just curious 1. what is this list for 2. who else is on it?" It turned out that every permanent Microsoft employee in the world was on that list. Hilarity ensued. People made snarky replies (including several "STOP HITTING REPLY ALL" sent--as reply alls), learned to use their inbox filters, and went quietly insane until the internal Msoft servers crumbled under the strain. I have a commemorative t-shirt of the event. Good times.

[pierrekrahn.livejournal.com]

Happened in the government too. I was off that day and came back to over 60 emails that had been sent to tens of thousands of people

[kfops.livejournal.com]

It's funny... I think there was an article on SlashDot just the other day about companies taking the step of disabling the "reply-all" button. I mentioned that to my manager and he looked at me like I came from Mars.

I don't know how he knew, but that's beside the point.

[dronon.livejournal.com]

At the cesspool of academe I used to work at, we had a variation of that problem where some of our users would subscribe to electronic mailing lists. Then they'd go on vacation and set their e-mail to auto-reply with an "away" message to any e-mail they received.

So the instant a message from their mailing list showed up in their mailbox, their e-mail would automatically reply to the mailing-list address, be passed on to everyone else on the list, and hell ensued. It was even worse if the mailing-list was badly set up, so they'd receive a copy of their own message back, which would be auto-replied to... and so on. Way to go, university professors and their entitled graduate students.

Naah, they weren't all that bad, but the memories of the bad ones still linger. :)