
When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed? - podopie
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/technology/when-im-mistakenly-put-on-an-email-chain-should-i-hit-reply-all-asking-to-be-removed.html
======
williamscales
Relevant Wikipedia page, since the article is completely lacking in historical
context:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm)

"On 14 October 1997, a Microsoft employee noticed that they were on an as-yet
unknown email distribution list 'Bedlam DL3', and emailed the list asking to
be removed. This list contained approximately a quarter of the company's
employees, 13,000 email addresses. Other users replied to the list with
similar requests and still others responded with pleas to stop replying to the
list. A Microsoft employee estimates that 15 million emails were sent, using
195 GB of traffic."

~~~
kchoudhu
This happened a few times at the bank I worked at for almost a decade.

You could count on the technologists to not throw gas on the fire by replying
(everyone'd heard of Bedlam DL3), but once non-technical sales, trading and
ops were on the list, all bets were off.

~~~
losteric
Well, aside from the trolling devs. At my company there've been a couple
incidents of this where someone jumps on the thread with advice like
"Unsubscribe has to be in the _title_ " or "You have to BCC the list!". When
that happens... oh dear god.

------
superuser2
Crusty though the software is, this is why list-hosts matter. Reply all is a
terrible way to manage group communication by email. list-
name@lists.domain.com is a pretty decent way to go about it. Emails that get
distributed have a [list-name] tag prepended to the subject line for trivial
filtering on the client side. You can set a large list to require moderation
before distributing messages (except from a list of blessed senders). You can
tell the software to set the Reply-To header to the sender's email, rather
than the list's address, so that the "Reply" and "Reply all" buttons have the
expected behavior. And there is self-service subscribe/unsubscribe via a web
interface (with permissions, of course).

My university operates such a server and it's heavily used by everyone from
department announcements to student organization coordination/discussion.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/](https://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/)

------
nofinator
This is purely anecdotal, but I am seeing far fewer replyallpocalypses than I
did 10-15 years ago.

Has something changed, like better server or client email software? Or perhaps
admins and users are more savvy about avoiding this kind of behavior?

(Maybe I've just been lucky to not have to deal with one of these for several
years.)

~~~
djhworld
I've seen maybe 1 a year over the past 5 years. The best ones are the ones
that are sent out by accident, like, cc'ing in the distribution list to EVERY
employee by mistake.

I love it and hate it, I find it laughable that it just keeps on going, but it
makes me sad that some humans cannot grasp what they are doing, nor learn from
the example, and this is in huge global organisations too, full of supposedly
professional, educated people!

My favourite one of all time though is when a reply-all chain (office wide,
think 1000+ recipients....) was fully in its stride and someone attached a
10mb animated GIF.

Needless to say, I don't think the people managing the Outlook Exchange
servers had a good day that day trying to cope with that one...

~~~
antognini
I've seen flamewars where someone would copy the entire text of Beowulf into
the reply just so that everyone would have dozens of copies of it that would
be dragged around every time someone added something to the chain.

------
cylinder
Why was the answer in a PDF? I don't understand. The increased casualness of
the NYT lately has been bothering me.

~~~
jawns
My best guess: The article is about an online faux pas, and hyperlinking to a
PDF when an HTML page would be perfectly sufficient is a self-aware nod to
another online faux pas. (Fellow HN user oneeyedpigeon points out this faux
pas in their comment.)

My seventh-best guess: The NYTimes' CMS lacks support for actual footnotes, so
linking to another page is the next best thing. But since the footnote doesn't
make complete sense unless you've come from the main article, the web editors
didn't want the other page to be easily discoverable. Problem is, the CMS
automatically makes any article styled as a regular article SEO-friendly, so
they decided to work around that by putting the text into a less-SEO-friendly
PDF.

------
oneeyedpigeon
When I want to publish some text on the open internet, should I put it all in
a print-focussed file format instead of the HTML standard?

No.

------
satysin
Content of the ridiculous article in PDF

By Daniel Victor

O.K., here’s a little more context, for those of you who need it.

It begins when an innocuous email that you probably don’t need lands in your
inbox (as it did mine on Thursday).

Soon someone inevitably replies (all): “Please remove me from this email
chain.”

Then another: “Unsubscribe.”

Soon, dozens of people are replying­all, sending their fruitless requests to
people who are equally annoyed. Notifications on your phone won’t stop
buzzing.

This is known as the dreaded replyallpocalypse.

When you are in this situation, the logical, expert opinion is: Do not hit
“reply all.”

You will only make things worse.

Another option: If you’re using Gmail, you could mute the conversation and go
on with your day.

Otherwise, hunker down. We’re all in this together, and it’ll all be over
soon.

------
oxguy3
I mostly don't experience this, with one notable exception. My uni's computer
science department administrator has a mailing list for my entire class (~80
students). Whenever she sent out an email blast, it would appear to come from
her email address, but for god knows what reason, the Reply-To address was set
to the mailing list's address.

So basically every time someone had something they needed to discuss with the
dept admin after an email blast went out, they would end up sending their
response to the entire CS class. No matter how many times it happened, there
would always be that one person who hadn't yet learned not to reply to the
email blasts.

------
Aloha
"The New York Times’s internal email system contributed to this report."

------
andreasklinger
For those who wonder (also mentioned in the article) in gmail there is a
feature called "mute" exactly for this.

------
stcredzero
Couldn't an "unsubscribe" functionality be written into an email server? You'd
have to change the way mailboxes are stored. In particular, email threads and
recipients lists would have to become explicit objects in a distributed
database. Perhaps threads could be identified by a canonicalized version of
the original recipients list, plus some other information?

~~~
joesmo
Or you could just reply to the list itself with the word 'remove' in the
subject (doesn't work for all list servers). That's how most servers handled
subscriptions back in the days and probably still is now.

~~~
stcredzero
That would work for a LISTSERV -- but this is a special kind of server that
does keep the list as an explicit object. If it's a recipients list in a
regular email, that would be different.

------
nkrisc
At a former job someone sent a completely inane email asking about something
personal to an HR email list or all people in the company, about 21,000
people.

Why does such an email list even exist? For some kind of HR emergency? Aren't
there other emergency messaging systems that could be more effective?

~~~
pavel_lishin
At my company, certain lists can only be used by certain people to prevent
exactly this sort of thing.

~~~
nkrisc
Perhaps they implemented such a restriction afterwards. Fortunately I never
found out; perhaps they did.

------
tantalor
As mentioned by the pdf, "Muting or ignoring conversations" in Gmail:
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/47787?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/47787?hl=en)

------
Havoc
My employer just issued written notices to people sending mails to "Territory
All" type addresses without good reason. I mean it asks you 3 fk'in times "Are
you sure???"...

------
jandrese
Like most article titles that end in a question mark, the answer is no.

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guruparan18
Should I reply all and tell them not-to reply all?

Still NO.

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altendo
they say brevity is wit, and the NYT does not disappoint

