

Free bananas in the kitchen!!! (what happens when reply-all goes amok) - bd
http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-THIS-LIST#2408665

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agotterer
My company makes people think twice about reply-alls. Check it out -
<http://vimeo.com/2543204>

~~~
PStamatiou
working for CV must be a blast. Tell Jake and Amir that I'm wearing their
shirt as we speak..

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diN0bot
haha. we had a pretty raucous "tie day" email thread at work once. everyone
kept posting pictures of people wearing ties, or tye dyes, or colonel tigh,
etc. lots of good fun, but definitely consuming way too much time and
enjoyment to be productive.

finally the ceo stepped in to put an end to, though two higher ups still came
back with even witty tie day references.

the joyfulness of that discussion brings a smile to my face.

~~~
cgranade
OK, you must work somewhere sufficiently awesome if pictures of Tigh come up
on Tie Day.

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snprbob86
The Outlook and Exchange teams stress test their systems with the following
Microsoft distribution lists: internz, gmrchat, failboat, lolcats, and bacon

~~~
gaius
If I was on the Outlook team at MS I'd have made the reply-all button 4x as
big, for the lulz.

I am pretty sure with the Office Resource Kit you can disable it company-wide
with a group policy, people just fire up Outlook one day and it's gone. No
idea why Windows admins don't do that (you can still reply-to-all if you
_really_ want to using the Actions menu).

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wallflower
Reply-all doomsday scenarios seems like they could be avoided if reply-all is
disabled when the count of recipients exceeds a certain number.

On a side note, one of my colleagues has a first+last name that is one hyphen
off from one of our largest distribution (external) mailing lists. I usually
IM him instead.

~~~
patio11
Right, but that doesn't necessarily help when the reply-all goes to one
recipient... which is a mailing list with 60,000 people on it.

As the Wizards of the Coast promotional mailing list was, the first time this
happened to me in my Magic-playing days. (Strangely enough, it was also
configured to accept messages from people outside the company. This was, in
hindsight, a bad call.)

~~~
DenisM
offtopic:

you were going to post about spending $1000 for advertising
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420300>

How is it coming along? :-)

~~~
patio11
Busy with paying customers (just released new version of BCC, putting out
brush fires). Check back on weekend.

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icey
In a (US) Embassy, there is something in place called the Warden Cascade
System. It's a low-tech solution to help crisis management. Basically it's a
pyramid scheme centered around phone calls. Someone triggers the cascade by
calling a few people, and they each call a few people, and so forth; until the
message has been conveyed to everyone it needs to be conveyed to.

Something like that would be handy in these sorts of situations - pick up the
phone and call some offices, it's easier to manage these sorts of outbreaks as
though you're dealing with many smaller entities than as one monolithic unit.

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steveplace
We had an epic email that got sent company wide and asked for donations to a
church (complete accident; blame stupidity over malice). Took down the email
servers for ~24 hours.

Note: 6000+ employee company

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ALee
Best thing to do is generally.

Direct it to one person who is the responsible party and BCC everyone else. If
it's a mass e-mail, then BCC everyone. I think it all starts from the top.

~~~
snprbob86
No! Please no! BCCs break everyones filters/rules. Some percentage of derailed
threads end with "Moving DL to BCC" which drives me NUTS because I get this
message in my Inbox which throws me off my rhythm while I try to figure out
what the heck it is talking about.

Personally, I think BCC should be eliminated. I think that every reasonable
use case for BCC can be accomplished with a send and then a separate forward.
Is there something I'm missing?

~~~
grouchyOldGuy
I feel the opposite way: eliminate CC: and keep BCC:. People use CC: way too
often when a BCC: is more appropriate. Unfortunately, the worst abusers are
the most clueless and least likely to change.

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raleec
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429126> multinational + >25000 employees
= lotsa fun...

