Stopping the Horror of 'Reply All' 256
theodp writes "The WSJ's Elizabeth Bernstein reports that Reply All is still the button everyone loves to hate. 'This shouldn't still be happening,' Bernstein says of those heart-stopping moments (YouTube) when one realizes that he or she's hit 'reply all' and fired off a rant for all to see. 'After almost two decades of constant, grinding email use, we should all be too tech-savvy to keep making the same mortifying mistake, too careful to keep putting our relationships and careers on the line because of sloppiness.' Vendors have made some attempts to stop people from shooting themselves in the foot and perhaps even starting a Reply All email storm. Outlook allows users to elect to get a warning if they try to email to more than 50 people. Gmail offers an Undo Send button, which can be enabled by setting a delay in your out-bound emails, from 5-30 seconds, after which you're SOL. And AOL is considering showing faces, rather than just names, in the To field in a new email product. 'I wonder if the Reply All problem would occur if you saw 100 faces in the email,' AOL's Bill Wetherell says."
Re:And of course Facebook says fuck you (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I think Reply All is very useful (Score:5, Informative)
>>>Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it.
(1) Don't care because it saves me typing ~50 emails.
(2) Not if you change the subject. Then it starts a new thread.
No it doesn't. If you hit reply button, it adds In-Reply-To: and/or References: headers, so your new message will still show up as belonging to an old thread. Changing the subject doesn't change this in any email clients I know of.
Re:I think Reply All is very useful (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. Threads are determined by other headers, not the subject, in any client worth their salt. Just because Outlook threads by subject, doesn't make it proper.