7 Stories of Replyallpocalypse & Other Email Blunders
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See the full post here: MSP Blog
The following are some responses that we got when we posed this question in Spiceworks. We would love for you to add your own as well!
That dreaded Reply All button. If only there were some kind of app or plug-in that made people have to answer a challenging calculus problem in order to enable it. OK, maybe instead they should have to answer a series of questions, like "Do you really intend to send this message to the entire company?" followed by "Are you contributing anything of value to the other recipients on this listserv?" Don't get me wrong, Reply All has its uses, but it can also be terribly abused. Just look at how it's plaguing the inboxes of thousands of Time Inc. employees! And if you think it's just a workplace annoyance with no real harm, then these stories will make you think twice before sending your next email. We reached out to IT professionals and MSPs on Spiceworks, asking them to share their funniest and worst Replyallpocalypse moments, and they did not disappoint. Keep reading for some of our favorites!
1. Warnings for Repeat Offenders
If you have members of your team that are Reply All happy, you may consider penalizing offenders like this IT department did:
2. Blame Orville Redenbacher
This next anecdote may have been prevented had the company used separate listservs for each of their locations. But hey, all of this could have been avoided had they had a popcorn machine in their kitchen like some offices do!
Too bad she didn't wait to send it on National Popcorn Day, a holiday I trust you all know was last week.
3. An Interoffice Romance
Isn't this how Jim and Pam got together too?
4. Are You There Chico? It's Me, Margaret
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I remember working for the world's largest bank (back when it still was) and a young system administrator responded with a "reply all" that included saying that "the bank's director has no idea what he is talking about" with the SVP and the Director himself on the reply all chain. The SVP nearly drove off of the road when he read it on his BB on his way into the office.
Didn't get fired though, but they poked a lot of fun at him. That Director actually poached him later when he went to a competitor.
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I've had users reply all to DL's that have crashed exchange servers. . .
I love users.
Just constantly circular email going back and forth and hitting 100 employees at the same time...
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I have heard of that, but never with only one hundred users on a server. That's a lot of responses for so few people.
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When you work in the gutters... you get sewers to play with....
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It didn't happen to me but at the high school I worked at they had an on-site exchange server (we moved it off site when I was there) that was circa 2000 (I think). Two people had Out of Office replies and at the time there wasn't a setting to only send that once per user. So there was a sent message to everyone in the school, ~100 accounts, and these two accounts were replying Out of Office to each other over and over again... things got really sluggish and then after two hours stopped working altogether from what one of the techs told me.
