

"Reply All" shuts down German Bundestag Mail (Google translate) - VMG
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnetzpolitik.org%2F2012%2Fspas-im-bundestag-das-kurschnergate%2F&sl=de&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8

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nlawalker
I love dragging this out:

[http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/10962...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx)

tl;dr - Bedlam DL3, a famous "Me too" reply-all incident at Microsoft in 2004,
on the order of 15 million total messages.

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Joeboy
That's a funny coincidence. Exactly the same thing happened at the large
British financial organisation I work for today. What kind of person sends a
"Please don't reply-all" message with reply all?

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jey
It would make a lot of sense if people actually listened to the advice and
stopped replying-all. Terminating the chain-reaction would easily easily be
worth the price of one reply-all, but in reality enough people would ignore
the advice.

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viraptor
I think the issue is that many people would react, but when they read the
emails in the thread one by one they might decide to respond before getting to
the advice. Similar to what happened to me lately when I sent out information
that I can't make the meeting, then some time later that I'll be there, but
have to run away early, then something else again (over a couple of hours).
When the recipient came to the office, he rescheduled the meeting 3 times in 5
minutes instead of reading all the emails first.

Is it bad though? Should we really expect people to process all emails at once
and only then act on them?

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nluqo
A reply-all debacle occurred where I was a consultant a couple years back (at
a quasi-government corporation with 5000 employees).

In this case, "Should we really expect..." is like saying "should we really
expect people to read a dozen emails before sending 5000?" Yea, I think so.

One of our consultants wrote off a sarcastic reply-all email in response
detailing what the reply all button actually did as if explaining to 5 year
olds. The client demanded that this person be fired.

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ugh
Wow, that's an horrific translation. Google Translate usually does much
better. I guess it has still problems with more informal blogposts but does a
decent job with journalistic texts.

