No matter how many times you warn people, there will always be the tendency for those colleagues to click that reply all button even though all 2000 of their colleagues are now tagged into the email. Because someone forgot to use BCC instead and as if we’re all actually interested in what they have to say on the topic. Even worse, when everyone decides to do the same and have a discussion with everyone on that email chain. It’s for this reason that many companies block who can send to who on a certain distribution list
Sadly though, this hasn’t stopped people’s lack of awareness of the power of the reply all button and why most times you just should never use it. This trend will start to go away soon as Microsoft is rolling out a new reply-all protection feature for Office 365 and Exchange Online. The feature is designed to prevent email storms when hundreds or thousands of people start replying to an email thread.
The new block feature will mostly benefit large organisations and is initially being rolled out to detect 10 reply-all emails to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes, as explained by the company in a recent blog post:
Over time, as we gather usage telemetry and customer feedback, we expect to tweak, fine-tune, and enhance the Reply All Storm Protection feature to make it even more valuable to a broader range of Office 365 customers
To be fair, most companies have done a good job at configuring distribution lists to prevent this and Outlook does already display a message indicating how many people are including on any email thread. Still, I guess more needs to bed done and maybe this new update will eventually stop the plight of people replying everyone inside their companies.
Last Updated: May 11, 2020
Guz
May 11, 2020 at 14:45
The good ol reply to the whole company with “noted”
HvR
May 11, 2020 at 17:27
or the “Karen did you see this?”