Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm Microsoft is right now groaning under the weight of a 52,000-person internal Reply-All email storm. The Register understands this one started when Microsoft’s internal store shared a mail about discount software deals for friends and family of Microsoft staff. While that offer was generous, it didn’t apply to all Microsoft …
The Bedlam DL3 email storm of 1997 did actually have an impact on mail server design. See Wikipedia and various first person accounts on the web,
There was another MS-related email storm last week when 3000 customers were sent an invite to an online webinar and instructed to reply-all. Cue hundreds of IT professionals sending "Unsubscribe" messages that added to the storm. Not a single one noticed that they had received N-1 unsubscribe requests that were the essence of the storm.
There is a subspecies of human that can't see why they shouldn't reply to every email with the reply all button. I suspect they are the same idiots that feel the need to reply "no" to "does anyone.." emails.
In other words;
You'll get an email saying, say "Who's turn is it to chair the meeting?" And then everyone gets another one from someone saying "not me".
That's actually slightly useful.
If you get no answers at all, Amazon will hide your question. Bad answers will make the question show up on the product page, where others may come along and give a proper answer.
Now... those who give a 4-star review with a rambling response about why they got it, and how they've given it to someone else and have no idea if it works... They should be removed from the gene pool.
Reminds me of an email faux pas back in the late 90's in the days of Lotus Notes.
I was a lowly student in a large multinational chemical company. I had no transport to work so decided to send out an email asking for a lift to work. I'd pay some money to petrol obviously.
I set my out of office up for a 2 week holiday, thinking I'd read the generous offers when I got back.
What I'd forgotten to do was click off the "Request Read Receipt" option in Notes. (Scratch "forgotten", I think to ignorant to realise might be better}
I returned to work 2 weeks later with a straight to the bosses office moment. Apparently my innocent email had setoff a nasty death spiral of read receipt \ out of office mails that crashed the email server. I never asked if it was the whole company.....
When my boss realised I hadn't done this intentionally we had a polite chat about email etiquette and moved on. I never mentioned it to the IT admin nor did he mention it to me!
Apple Mail has not had Read Receipts for years, I'm guessing Steve Jobs or Tim Apple (*cough*) shared your sentiment.
Thunderbird, however, has both read receipts and delivery notification flags still available. The latter is sometimes interesting as it is a server response - the user doesn't see it. If the server admin has not switched it off, the user has zero control over it.
Some of my in-office correspondents have receipt set on, which at my end appears as a request whether to send the receipt or not. I do pause to decide, but usually send. Especially if it's The Boss.
After it happened, it's obvious-ish that "out of office" messages shouldn't request a read receipt even when you have that set on by default. But that requires the e-mail server to treat those messages as an exception to the "request receipt" setting. And you may not notice that until after it happened.
Anyone remember Watch Your Back from Grinning Shark. It was a read receipt toolbox for Outlook. It could simply block the sending of read receipts or if you were feeling evil, you could change the test in the read receipt or spam the sender with hundreds of read receipts for each email received.
Come work at Microsoft where the yuks never cease. I mean Fred from the Notepad team, he's got this poster on his wall that says "You don't have to be mad to work here : but it helps!". And Monica from the crash screen background colour research group, she sent one round with the title "I Love You!" Although she got sacked for that........
Who's got the cat hanging from the branch with the "Hang in there Baby!" caption?
In my early 90s Data General days, we had just strung orange (plenum safe) Ethernet around the building and the engineers had just received their UNIX workstations. Shortly thereafter, they discovered "xnetrek", where you could zoom around the known universe, blasting Klingons (while bringing the Ethernet to a screeching halt).
Gaming hours were quickly decreed to begin at 16:00, once the network came back up.
In what way? I think most servers are capable of cancelling a reply all automatically, and the article confirms that was possible in this case as well. That doesn't help if someone doesn't enable it for the message, though. So does your server manage to automatically determine that this is necessary? Does it also work correctly when someone is supposed to reply all to a message with a lot of recipients, for example to update its content? That happens too.
There's no reason a mailserver couldn't limit the number of "to" addressees after list expansion to some reasonable number, or forcibly move any lists containing more than 'x' addresses to the bcc line with a dummy 'to' address substituted (all-employees --> all-employees-noreply)
"There's no reason a mailserver couldn't limit [...]"
There's no reason it couldn't, but several why it shouldn't. Let's look at your suggestions:
"limit the number of "to" addressees after list expansion to some reasonable number,"
What reasonable number? What if I have a list that has more people on it because I want to reach them all? The right answer is to limit who can send mail to that list, but we're discussing automatic methods the server can take when I've forgotten to set that, and this particular one blocks me from sending an all-company email at all. Maybe you just meant replies, but there are times when I might want to send a message and have someone reply to it. Maybe I'm replying to it to send out an update. Maybe someone else on my team is replying with the update. Maybe it's a company-wide congratulatory email and we're letting some senior managers reply with their congratulations as well as a morale method (while they're composing their congratulations, they're not affecting others' work).
"forcibly move any lists containing more than 'x' addresses to the bcc line with a dummy 'to' address substituted (all-employees --> all-employees-noreply)"
That makes a list unsuccessful if it's intended to let people discuss things. This could be a public list for any employees who are interested, and they're allowed to talk on the list too. Once enough interested parties join, the list breaks for everyone.
There is a clear right way to do this. When you create lists, limit who can send messages to them. If you need to receive replies, redirect the emails sent to the list from people who don't have rights to send to the list to a different address from which you can read them. If the mailserver can do that, and they nearly all can, you don't need to do much more. Except remember to turn it on.
We're closed down and they have me sitting in the office by myself trying to upgrade all the systems to Windows 10 - watching how it's going I think this latest Microsoft screw up is just a little more evidence for banning Microsoft from the computer and tech world altogether. They simply aren't competent these days.
XP was good but insecure, Vista was secure, Window 7 was usable, and it's just a turd sliding downhill ever since.
Where I work we have a number of pre-defined email lists, all of which are prefixed by a departmental prefix: XYZ-Finance (~10 people), XYZ-Travel (similar) etc. and XYX-All (~2k). I've lost count of the number of times some-one has Auto-completed to XYX-All instead of XYZ-SmallGroup. I would sneer, but I'm afraid I've done it too. I'm pleased to say that on receiving one of these I've never replied to all to warn the perp of their misdeed though, another all too common occurrence.
My former employer caused the only one out of office reply rule to be created. One of the civil deputies set his out of office message to be sent to all users. Lots of people didn't care that he was in Yakima for depositions that day and told him so in no uncertain terms, which generated another all user out of office and started the snowball rolling. We dubbed him the Unamailer.
If I follow, you're describing two things:
An automatic out-of-office message should not be sent to a recipient a second time if they e-mail twice.
Sending "I am out of the office" to everyone in the organisation - not as a response, you just want to tell everybody - is only appropriate if you really are as important as you think you are, and is a way to find that out.
Over 10 years ago I was a volunteer Board member for a charity. They had an MS Small Business Server that ran Exchange/IIS/SQL/PDC etc. I was asked to "keep an eye on the IT" as they had nobody trained up for it. The person who had been asked to run it on a day-to-day basis managed to kill it by cleverly breaking their multimedia PowerPoint presentation into a number off smaller bits (<10MB?) and sending it to only about 20 users, asking them to make any changes they thought necessary. As the 20 were Managers, trainers, or Board members all of them (except me) had an input. So within a couple of days of Reply All, each mail message went to everyone with each individuals' changes to each bit of the presentation. Exchange fell over when it ran out of space on its disk. The disk that was normally used to repair/truncate/pack Exchange was not big enough -So when I tried to fix it it crashed. The fix was obvious - Add a bigger disk - The only problem was that our vender had supplied a "proper" IBM Server with SCSI drives and our local supply chain didn't have any, so we had 2 weeks of people using their personal email accounts...
It should be noted that the fault lay not with those using reply-all:-, which is a reasonable response if you wish your comment to be read by all those in the to:- list.
The fault lay with the fool who sent an email to large numbers of people using to:- rather than bcc:-
I had blazing rows with our HR department over their use of to:- with the entire site mail list. Unfortunately, being HR folk, they didn't understand the rfcs.
Back in 1996 I was on the new Performer helpline at Apple (UK) Ltd., headquarters in Stockley Park and there were some Microsoft email servers for the UK network.
A HyperCard program was set up to subscribe and unsubscribe people from a tech support database which had an auto reply function if you left the original subject line unaltered.
So far so good until someone used the system to inform everyone of a new technical issue. Meanwhile someone else had set up their Microsoft Mail to make an auto reply out of the office.
The Microsoft Mail duly replied to the technical issue saying it (he) was out of the office which the HyperCard program duly sent to everyone including the original sender, which duly replied it (he) was out of the office; ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
My own contribution was, “Isn’t this great!” Others joined in and added contacts from across the pond so they could share in the fun.
Eventually some spoilsport pulled the plug on the auto answer out of the office mac.
It was one of my best days there.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
