
Nielsen Deletes Reply-To-All Button - bkrausz
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/31/nielsen-deletes-reply-to-all-button/
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mixmax
reply-to-all is probably the major cause of e-mail overload and congestion so
I think that this is an excellent idea.

It's basically a question of overall effectivity, meaning that the time spent
on reading non-important e-mails should be kept to a minimum.

To play with some arbitrary numbers here's an example:

I receive an e-mail sent out to everyone in my department consisting of 50
people, and hit reply all to make a pun, correct a spelling mistake, or some
other trivial matter. It is easy to hit reply all, and thus I do it since I
think my pun is the funniest thing since LOLcats. Now there are 50 people who
have to read my e-mail, or at least deal with it. If they on average spend 30
seconds doing so that is half an hour of productivity that has been lost. If
ten e-mails go back and forth using reply-to-all (someone else might have an
even funnier joke, and since you set the tone they will also hit the reply-to-
all button) that is 5 hours of productivity lost.

If you really need to reply-to-all you can easily copy-paste the adresses.
This will maybe take you two minutes, and will thus result in an overall fall
in productivity of two minutes. A pretty stark contrast to the five hours...

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lrm242
Reply all is the source of major pain in most large companies. Many folks will
point to reply all "storms", where hundreds or thousands of drones will reply
to an email with a large distribution with something along the lines of:
"Don't reply all!" Of course, each time someone does this with reply all, the
snowball grows larger.

An even worse use of reply all, in my opinion, is this underlying desire of
most corporate cultures to drastically over communicate. Be it because they
are trying to cover their butt or because they naively buy into "communication
is good, therefore, I shall use a megaphone to speak to everyone". The end
result of this is a reduction of email's effectiveness and standard conference
call quotes such as, "Send me an email and put REALLY IMPORTANT in the subject
so that I don't ignore it". It's pathetic.

Email etiquette is, unfortunately, dead in corporate America.

EDIT: In summary, Reply All doesn't ruin email, people ruin email. Or some
such thing :).

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jodrellblank
In a similar vein, I think people go to far with "Email contains important
information, therefore everyone must keep all email".

A large percentage of email is dross, and a large percent of the text in any
given email is dross or repeats (quoted text in reply/forwards). Filter out
the important bits into a useful system and delete the email, I say.

Or, in another way of saying it, buried deep in an email archive is not the
best place for any given piece of information. Especially not any information
that anybody else might ever need to look at - which, in a company, is quite a
lot.

The sheer effort of remembering what might be in there, the ensuing obligation
to search your massive archive any time you need any information just in case
(because you can't be sure if it's there or not), the minimal hassle of not
finding most 'important' information and the large amount of 'information'
that you will, in practice, never look at again makes it a dubious thing to
do, IMO. Not to mention the hassle, disk space, database maintenance, backup
bloat and on and on.

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jgfoot
In my line of work (law), people can be offended or grow suspicious if they
are left off of an e-mail. They don't want the feeling that a discussion is
happening behind their back, or without their having the chance to give input.
It's often better to load up your cc line than it is to risk offense.

~~~
Hexstream
Someone might be offended by being left off an inane pun thread? I'd love to
be "offended" that way.

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corentin
In essence, they're telling their employees they're too stubborn or stupid to
follow guidelines and use their judgment when it comes to responding to email.

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mixmax
Looking at the average corporate employee they're probably right.

~~~
mixmax
Since the parent got downmodded, I better explain myself a little better.

My point was that the average employee in a large corporation doesn't see the
implications of a reply-to-all, and how much e-mail overload and lost time it
amounts to down the road. This isn't implying that these employees are less
intelligent or otherwise impaired, it is simply implying that this is not
something an average employee would think about. Just like I will forget to
change the oil in my car: Obvious to a mechanic, but I just don't think about
it, or don't know.

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joshwa
My Fortune-100 employer just did almost the same thing-- buried the Reply All
in a submenu under 'Reply'. It hasn't stopped the stupidity of people emailing
their lunch orders to the entire division. Now I know that the EVP of site
development likes turkey and cheese, no mustard.

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kwamenum86
I actually find the reply to all button quite useful. Often times there are
several people in the office that should see a particular email thread
(whether they choose to read it) and achieving this with just a reply button
would be more than a little annoying.

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mattmcknight
I think this is a good option for "are you sure you want to send this to n
people". (Of course, you would need a way to calculate how many people are on
a distribution list.) It would be even better if it looked at the length and
complexity of the email and attachments, estimated how long it would take to
read, multiplied by an hourly cost of like $100/hr, and then made you at least
aware of the cost...

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fhars
Of course the issue is almost as contentious as emacs vs. vi, but in the
interest of truth I will still say it: Reply-To-All is the button that makes
correctly managed mailing lists work, because without it you cannot reply to a
message on list. See <http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html> for the
technical details.

~~~
wmf
I suspect that companies using Outlook do not use Internet-style mailing
lists. It's a cultural mismatch.

~~~
jodrellblank
Probably not helped by Outlook's irritating top quoting.

> It's a cultural mismatch.

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vaksel
I think this is overboard....instead of deleting the reply to all button, it
should be limited to only 10-15 people.

Because if you limit reply to all button as it is..what happens if you need to
reply to even 2 people?

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Jakob
I like the idea. "Reply all" is for twitter or a wiki. My inbox should consist
only of messages that were specifically adressed (or in rare cases bcc’d) to
me.

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akd
I removed the Reply-All button from my Outlook toolbar so that I have to
right-click to use it. It definitely reduces the chance of accidentally
replying-all.

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ahoyhere
If you read the article, sounds like it may have come about, in large part,
due to an exec accidentally replying-all with an arrogant message that went to
the whole company.

I doubt they're interested in paving the way to improve corporate email for
corporate email's sake.

