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."
Tales of old. (Score:5, Funny)
That's a nice email storm infographic they have. One time back in the 90s at Indiana University when people were mostly still using pine, a secretary at the College of Arts and Sciences sent out an email to several thousand students and put all their addresses in the two line. The headers themselves were a megabyte alone and it took a minute to open the message. Several people started replying to all and asking to be removed. It culminated with UCS terminating the mail in the queues and inboxes and suspending several user accounts. One guy replied saying something like "I just wanted everyone to know that Jim Smith takes it in the rear".
Re:Tales of old. (Score:4, Interesting)
People would occasionally do that in my University classes of several hundred. I couldn't resist a reply-all with a simple "what", or better yet, "hey josh, what did you get for problem 7", then the ensuing storm of people reply-all messages saying not to do that, etc.
I love reply-all, I have gmail setup to use it by default. In my opinion it's a lot easier to avoid accidentally sending messages to everyone if your default behavior is to reply to everyone.
Re:Tales of old. (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the solution in K-9 Mail (android app) better.
The on screen menu has 'reply', you actually have to tap another button to get to 'reply-all'. It can be tedious, but it has prevented the reply-all issues in my case.
Re:Tales of old. (Score:5, Funny)
damnit. That was supposed to go to Whatsisname, not all of Slashdot!
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So was "What?" ;)
Re:Tales of old. (Score:4, Funny)
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Please stop woooshing to all.
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Re:Tales of old. (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to understand that mistakes can and do happen, and it's a very simple UI fix to prevent. As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used, it shouldn't be as easy to click as the single reply button, something that is probably used 99% of the time instead of reply-all, that's simply poor user interface design to do so. There is no need to have one rarely needed button with possibly serious consequences directly adjacent to the more benign button that most people intend to click anyway.
Re:Tales of old. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between "should only rarely be used" and "I rarely use." Just because it's not part of your way of doing business doesn't make it wrong. I find reply all essential for keeping a team of people together, particularly when there needs to be coordination of tasks.
The real problem is people don't use BCC [wikipedia.org] more for mass distributions. If you don't have the addresses, you can't spam them back with a reply all.
And if so they're entire tomes of crock. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure there are entire tomes of email etiquette books that universally advise against the use of "reply all".
And if so they're tomes full of something else as well.
"Reply All" allows the instant creation of a task-based "mailing list" in a business setting, without the overhead of setting up a mailing list and tearing it down after the task is done.
If the mail tools didn't have it, participations in a flash crew would require copying all the addresses every time. That's a job for a computer, not a busy worker with a mouse and incipient carpal tunnel syndrome. And accidentally dropping one address can not only disrupt the operation but offend the lost worker.
Imagine the effect on office productivity of doubling (or more) the time to communicate. It can dwarf the time spent in deleting the occasional emails from being improperly added to the Cc: list on mail exchanges that are one-shot or will peter out in short order.
Sure "Reply All" can cause problems. So can fire, or virtually any other powerful tool when improperly used.
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Nah, he's probably right. Most sets of 'rules of X etiquette' seems to start out as a general set of rules for not acting like a dickhole, but invariably, it then swell up into a Lovecraftian monstrosity of self-righteous dogma.
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As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used...
"I don't use it" doesn't mean "other people don't use it". I'd actually say that half the emails I send are reply all.
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As reply-all is something that should only rarely be used...
"I don't use it" doesn't mean "other people don't use it". I'd actually say that half the emails I send are reply all.
Agreed, I make regular use of reply-all - great for keeping everyone on the team in the loop, especially when they are traveling and don't have regular access to the Sharepoint (yuck) team site.
Anytime I send something and I want to be careful that only one recipient gets it, I always use forward, that way I'm less likely to make the reply-all mistake.
Has worked for me so far and I don't have to hide the reply-all button.
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I very often need to have 2-3 people in the loop in addition to myself, I use "Reply to all" all the time. The problem is when you are on a huge mailing list like "Everyone in the company" and people use reply to all.
I just realized the simple solution, which doesn't require rewriting any email applications. Simply require a confirmation, like when you sign up for anything. If you take a "Reply to all" on the list, it won't actually get sent to the list. Instead you get a mail back that "This mailing list g
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How about having a limit of something like 5 or 10 addresses, and if it goes over that, all of the addresses get moved to the BCC field. This way, there are no extra steps for the user, the Reply To All will only get used for small groups since there won't be any large groups in the To field for ReplyToAll to reply to, and all email ge
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Actually, I probably use it more than reply. It's very common in my workplace for four or five people to be involved in a email discussion, and people use reply-all to keep everybody aware of what's being said.
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There is not one solution. Some people pay attention to everything and want a ton of tiny targets so that every task can be accomplished in one click. Other people want the 3 most common tasks instantly available, and the rest hidden behind a contextual menu so that deviation from routine forces a moment of thought before acting, decreasing the likelihood of making a mistake. Neither of those perspectives is wrong.
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In my business it is often for the various layers to request quotes for parts. From the customer to the manufacturer there can be 3-6 different people involved. Most of them don't know what bcc, or reply to all are let alone how to use them.
Or even customers requesting a quote from various suppliers. Most often one name is in the TO: field while the rest are BCC:(if they know how to use it, or CC: if they don't)
while techies know the difference, I can't tell you how many times I have given a simple email
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The solution is making people pay attention where they click, not "hiding buttons because users can't read", that same though is making popular software crappier every day.
K-9 is an Android (i.e. cellphone) app.
There's only but so much room for buttons on the small screen, so some typical buttons need to be moved to a menu. Reply To All is as good a choice as any, but I think this might actually be configurable.
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This is slashdot. The UI is never wrong. It's always the user's fault.
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My take on this is that if you don't Reply All but forget to send the message to someone, it's easy enough to forward the message to that person.
If you do Reply All and send the message to someone to whom it shouldn't have been sent, it's much less easy to "unsend" the message to that person.
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Personally, my favorite is to hit reply-all, pointing out the stupidity of putting everybody on the "to:" line, and instructing original sender to use BCC so that inanities like somebody hitting "reply-all" could torture everybody with something stupid, followed by a rant explaining how everybody receiving this message will SOON BE INUNDATED BY SPAM if ANY of the 4,000 recipients has been infected with a virus, which is most assuredly the case, so everybody knows who to thank for their new, unlimited supply
Re:Tales of old. (Score:5, Insightful)
Occasionally someone at my place of business somehow manages to send an email out to everyone in the department, or division, or even the whole company. Even on modern hardware the network will struggle if you send an email out to several hundreds or even thousands of recipients. But that wouldn't be so bad, what really finishes off the network are the several dozen people who feel the need to Reply All just to say "please remove me from this email last". Of course, after a dozen or so of those go out, you end up with two or three people sending a Reply All just to say "please stop sending your removal requests Reply All" The last one went out to 500 employees and I ended up with 40+ copies of the email in my inbox because of people being absolutely stupid.
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It only stopped after severa
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Occasionally someone at my place of business somehow manages to send an email out to everyone in the department, or division, or even the whole company. Even on modern hardware the network will struggle if you send an email out to several hundreds or even thousands of recipients.
I'm going to take a guess here that your place of business has its spam filter configured to run on each mail delivery, and on internal -> internal emails.
Oops.
Re:Tales of old. (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite reply-to-all story (which is 100% true; I was there, I participated, and I got in trouble for it at the end).
My high school had just got "email" (in the "you can email your teacher and other students" sense - they didn't trust us with outside links, or didn't trust the outside with us, one or the other). First Class, if you know the software. A few interesting facts:
Combine these facts, and you can mess with an entire school at once:
1. Pull up the list of everyone online, select all, send an email saying "Hi!"
2. Listen to the near-synchronous "ping" sound from three labs as they all receive the email.
3. Wait about ten seconds - at least two people will hit reply-all and say "who is this?" or similar.
4. Listen to a double-dose of "pings".
Wash, rinse, repeat - our best day we managed to have a continual storm of pings as emails whizzed back and forth. It only stopped when they sent teachers to the labs to instruct everyone to hit delete and leave it. (Which lead to getting in trouble part - although I think we got in more trouble for bogging the server down than for disrupting three classes *shrug*.)
The only better story I have is using Waterloo MacJanet's inability to delete a message without opening it first, combined with the ability to use alias to send an email to the same guy twenty times (as in, I hit send once, he gets twenty copies), to completely bury a friend's email account.
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Reminds me of when I was in high school. Net send--it was enabled. We were taking a final in the computer lab, and I finished early and discovered this. So, I did the only responsible thing and spoofed my name, did a 'net send *' with instructions on how to use it, and watched the mayhem ensue. Turns out the broadcasts were actually being sent campus-wide.
I didn't get in trouble, but they obviously shut down net send later that day. Two years later, teachers were still telling the story.
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We had a global-accessible share on the school server. All the school PCs had the VBScript interpreter enabled. I wrote a program that would constantly read a file (based on username) off the server, and display its contents. Another script could append to someone else's file. A chat program, basically. Based around *constant* network disk access.
The network was down for a week, the server had to be replaced. I got in trouble. On the plus side, the punishment basically involved working with the new IT guy t
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Microsoft has one too that basically crippled their email for a few days - Bedlam DL3 they call it.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/04/08/109626.aspx [msexchangeteam.com]
It didn't help that Exchange had a bug in it that made things even worse.
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I had to stop reading with Osterman's comment: "But even though Exchange is a REALLY good email system..."
Leave Reply All along (Score:4, Funny)
Just think of it as an opportunity for Darwinism.
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It has its uses. I've been using it more in the last week than probably the rest of my life combined. I've been doing group work over email with a small handful of people and reply all is a god send for that. The big problem is that there isn't typically a sanity check for when the list of addresses grows longer or a message asking if you really want to send it to everybody. Plus the buttons are often times right next to each other meaning that you can easily click the wrong one if you're not careful.
Re:Leave Reply All along (Score:4, Interesting)
That's like arguing we should be attracting dinosaur-killer meteor strikes to weed out the weak and unfit. A reply-all storm that size obliterates communication for the affected infrastructure for days. That's followed up by a fair bit of forensics, trying to backtrack the crapstorm to its initiating email, THEN followed by executing the guilty. Or not. If it's an executive secretary, it's probably just a mild talking-to.
OTOH, I've forgotten how many lulz there are to be had trolling in such a mailstorm, if you can get away with it.
Oh, BTW, epic fail DHS, but good work flushing out the Iranian spy*. Not that he was that good of a spy; if surreptitiously monitoring a DHS email list is equivalent to the Monty Python "How Not to be Seen [wikipedia.org] sketch, asking the group "'Is this being a joke?" while signing your email with your real-world credentials ("Amir Ferdosi Sazeman-e Sana'et-e Defa' Qom Iran") is the same as the guy at the beginning of the aforementioned sketch who stands up from behind cover when asked to (and gets shot).
*Yeah, I know, he's probably not really a spy. But seriously, Homeland Security, why are you letting foreign nationals from adversary nations subscribe to your email lists? WTF?
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So what happens if a friend and my boss are next to each other on my cell phone? That mean you call the wrong at the middle of the night one too?
Yes.
So what happens if a friend and my boss are next to each other on my cell phone? That mean you call the wrong at the middle of the night one too?
Yes.
Bad UI design means it happens whether the excuse is "really crappy" or not. People who think as you do, just haven't yet been burned badly by bad UIs. When it happens to you, you'll get clued in fast as to why "Pay attention to what you do" is really crappy UI design.
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Darwinism doesn't select for intelligence. Just survival.
Darwinism doesn't select for survival per se; Darwinism is about adaptability in order to enable survival.
maybe reply-all should automatically be bcc? (Score:2)
At least that way the email addresses do not get spammed to everyone. Or maybe that should be an additional dialog:
Do you want everyone to see all email addressees, do you want to hide email addresses with bcc, or do you want to cancel.
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There are plenty of cases where that is bad - collaboration via email, it support with multiple groups, etc. I prefer options that require an extra bit of effort for the reply all, that usually works well enough.
Doctor, it hurts when I do this. (Score:2)
So don't do that.
Corollary: Fire the ones who do it more than once.
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Devil's advocate: Software should make it hard to do stupid or dangerous things without really intending to.
That said, I find it to be an annoying tool more than anything else, because it makes it far far too easy to have lots of people hear discussions that really only need to involve 2 of people on the email. People don't seem to notice that the cost of CC'ing 10 people is as much as 2 minutes per person per email.
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No, and that's probably my biggest complaint about Windows. The engineers are telling me what I should be able to do, rather than making me raise my privileges to do whatever dangerous things I want to do. Admittedly that has changed and I believe that they finally got it more or less right with 7, but even up to about Vista they still hadn't gotten it right. And up to XP it was nigh impossible to get work done without being an admin account or doing some serious haxxoring of the system.
Something like UAC i
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So first we have a discus
I think Reply All is very useful (Score:4, Interesting)
Like if I'm sending "free books" or whatever to friends, I just click reply-all on an older email, trim out the 2-3 non relevant persons, and send off the email to all ~50 friends.
I've been fortunate never to have a "reply all" mistake at work or other embarrassing place. If anything I tend to hit "reply" by mistake, when I meant to include "all" the participants.
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"If anything I tend to hit "reply" by mistake, when I meant to include "all" the participants."
This is me. Every time I've ever hit 'Reply All' it was immediately preceeded by clicking 'Reply' and shouting 'D'oh!'
Re:I think Reply All is very useful (Score:5, Insightful)
Please stop doing this. Hitting reply-all on old emails destroys threading on pretty much all clients that support it. Your email client might have an address book and groups as an alternative.
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>>>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.
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.
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Proper? Sounds like IMproper behavior to me, seeing as there's no reason to count an email as part of the same thread once the subject has changed (substantially, not just the addition of a few RE:RE:RE:).
Either that or there should be an option to "break thread".
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(2) Depends on how the email client handles threading. From experience, some will, some won't. Gmail will even occasionally start a new thread when nothing has been changed and it should
Re: Inconsiderate (was "I think ReplyAll ...") (Score:3)
First, you may not care, but you're writing for the benefit of the addressee, not yourself.
Second, changing the Subject doesn't do squat, modulo what some email clients do with that change. Threading is based on the References header.
Third, your opinions are being posted to web forum. Is
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You don't have a clue.
Let it be. (Score:3)
Let it be, guys.
This is nothing more than social Darwinism. If you're dumb enough not only to send a nasty email, but to hit reply-all, you deserve what you get.
Reply all for vendors who can't figure out BCC (Score:4, Funny)
And of course Facebook says fuck you (Score:5, Insightful)
Bastards.
Re:And of course Facebook says fuck you (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe... (Score:2)
The worst I've seen (Score:4, Funny)
Our CEO at a company I used to work for sent out an all-employee mail detailing a salary freeze for all employees and voluntary redundancies. Moments later the CFO sent out an email to his accounts team detailing that their pay-rise would not be affected and that they should not consider redundancy... needless to say, the hapless git hit reply-all...
Low tech equivalents (Score:5, Interesting)
"Reply to all" is great for career-imperilling fun, but you can replicate the effect perfectly well with good old dead tree and snail-mail. Indeed, the closest thing I've had to a genuinely career-ending moment so far happened during my first year in work and was entirely down to a dead tree circulation mistake. Even now I still look back on it and cringe, even though I've since changed employers.
I needed to send two documents to different recipients in the (large) organisation I worked in, both of whom were based in different buildings in different parts of London. One was a routine, dull minute of a meeting. The other was a sensitive personnel-related document (relating to a staff disciplinary matter - I was in HR at the time). I decided to deal with the former first. I printed it out, put it in an envelope and put it in the out-tray for our internal delivery service (which had multiple collections daily and moved dead tree around our sites within about 30-60 minutes, depending on traffic). I then went back to find a secure mail pouch for the the personnel letter - only to find that the piece of paper I still had on my desk was the meeting minute. I look around and see the delivery guy vanishing into the lift with all of the internal mail.
Cue a 30 minute dash (and I do mean dash - literally running) across central London to beat the delivery van to our other site and intercept the envelope before the addressee could open it. I made it - by the skin of my teeth. Had I failed to, my career could have... well... turned out very differently - and not in a good sense. In a way, it was a good learning experience - I've been incredibly careful about what I put into envelopes ever since.
But it just goes to show that you don't need fancy new-fangled modern technology in order to ruin your career with a mis-addressed mail.
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Just imagine the LULZ that could be had by replacing the reply button in Outlook with a reply all button but keeping the original icon. Or by switching the two.
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Yep. I saw a guys naval career nearly end over a similar mistake - when we were doing some testing on sea trials a contractor needed to see a certain (unclassified) document, instead he was given the Secret version which he accidentally put in his brief case and took home... Fortunately the document was recovered, so the guy who made the mistake of handing over the wrong d
too tech savvy? (Score:2)
If Lamar Odom can still make bonehead mistakes and pass it to the opposition a few times a year after playing basketball for 20+ years, some schlub in an office can still mistakenly hit Reply All.
Easy in Thunderbird to fix (Score:4, Interesting)
After reading a couple of standard SlashDot "shoulda do this" comments, I pulled up my mail program, Thunderbird, and customized my toolbar so that "reply all" is to the right of the Thunderbird "search" bar. Far away from "reply". 15 seconds to do, 10 seconds to check that it was "sticky."
Stop bellyaching. Start fixing.
Oh, way, this is SlashDot...
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Some clients also allow you to delay the actual sending of the email for a few moments so you can pull it back if you notice an obvious mistake just after clicking send.
Don't use company email for personal conversations (Score:2)
I keep my business-related conversations to my dept. account. I keep my university conversations to my university account. I keep my personal conversations in my gmail account or through instant messengers.
Keep the spheres separate and life will be easier.
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true,and completely impractical.
yet another bad idea from aol (Score:2)
I wonder how long it would take your mail to download if there were 100 faces in the message. WHAT A BAD IDEA. thanks, AOL.
pop-up warning box listing all recipients (Score:2)
So disable the "Reply to All" button... (Score:2)
Open Outlook, load up the Visual Basic Editor and put this into a new module:
Then open an email and add a button pointing to that macro. After that, if you want to disable "Reply to All" then press the button. To re-enable, press it again.
Note! Only works on emails sent within same organisation. Only works on emails read on Microsoft Outlook. "Reply to All" is
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What are these "mouse-clicks" you speak of? ;)
I use Apple Mail and it's Command-Shift-R to reply all, or Command-R to just reply.
Never ever have made a mistake in which I actually wanted.
Only trouble with Reply-To munging on lists (Score:2)
I have much more trouble (and have been burnt by) the reply-to munging on some e-mail lists. What it does is rewrite the Reply-to to the mailing list address instead of the original sender, so that people with semi-broken clients without reply-to-list feature can just hit reply-to instead of having to type in the address of the mailing list on a reply.
Maybe we should just (Score:2)
become mature enough to stop pounding out angry rants?
PEBCAK (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you could try not being an asshole at work and keeping all of your correspondence in line with how you should present yourself. It is not the software vendor's fault if you are a moron or never evolved socially past middle school.
Two different issues (Score:2)
Accidental "reply all" is just that, an accident. Muscle memory, inattention, etc...it's going to happen for a variety of reasons. It could be handled as simply as a reply all having an extra "are you sure" dialog that includes a count of how many people will be receiving it.
reply all mailstorm is completely different...that is a result of INTENTIONAL behavior. people are INTENDING to reply to all, usually to show their idiocy by saying "stop replying t
hopeless (Score:2)
Burying "reply all" in the UI: big mistake. (Score:2)
The reply-all command is the main, default way of replying.
Reply-single is for the rare special case when a question is broadcast to a list of people, such that the answers are private or mutually uninteresting.
Reply-all is critically important for most e-mails involving multiple people, because without it, you fragment the discussion. You the end up with the "what, you didn't get the e-mail???" type situations.
More than 90% of all replies that I send on a daily basis require Reply-All, and I use it habitua
How about just not writing such "rants"? (Score:2)
n/t
It's a simple UI issue (Score:2)
Don't make "Reply to all" easy to do or don't make it easy to mistake for "Reply", or both.
I would suggest that overloading the Reply button would be the best approach. It would behave much like the Firefox "back" button: Click to reply, click and hold for a menu that includes "reply to all." Yes it's a little slower if reply to all is common for you, but that's what toolbar customization is for. You certainly will make no more mistakes.
Alternatively, put "Reply to all" *FAR AWAY* from "Reply." Like on the
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One of the best implementations I've seen was the one that Mulberry did. It has a single Reply button which actually understands the fields in the message such as Reply-To, brings up a dialog where you select which ones you want to send to, cc and bcc, where the default values where taken from what the headers said in the message.
Ah for the good old days (Score:2)
At my current job tho, people hate being left out of the loop, so reply-alls are the norm, rather than the exception. "Think before typing" hasn't been repealed, people just act like it has.
I guess it happens... (Score:2)
I mean, I guess it happens that people accidentally reply-all... but I've never done it and I've never been on the receiving end of it. I've been using email since the mid-80's from a personal standpoint and I've had a number of corporate email accounts, both large and small. I can't recall a single instance of this happening. The reply-all storms that I have experienced were clearly intentional, with the people doing the reply-all knowing full well that is what they were doing.
So I wonder if there reall
onosecond (Score:2)
Reply All isn't a problem (Score:2)
Reply All isn't a problem. As others have mentioned it bcc, how do we teach the ignorant MFs about bcc, perhaps bcc should be the default instead of to and cc?
E-mail advice for geeks like me (Score:2)
My life got a lot easier when I adopted the rule to never write anything in e-mail that I wouldn't want forwarded. Not only does it prevent the "reply all" problem, it also prevents the problem where the person I ranted to cc:'s the subject of the rant, either accidentally or as a way to stab me in the back.
Also, one thing I discovered is that while, as a geek, I chuckle when someone sends me an e-mail ranting about some idiot who deserves it, other (non-geek) people often feel uncomfortable when they see i
Buttons? On a Toolbar? (Score:2)
I actually had to check in my mail client to see if the Reply and Reply All buttons are next to each other. They are, and I didn't even know it.
Who (at least of the Slashdot posing crowd) doesn't do the equivalent of Command+R for reply or Command+Shift+R for Reply All and leaves the toolbar buttons alone?
evolution must continue (Score:2)
if we prevent the stupid from killing themselves we will never advance as a species, and will always have to deal with stupid people
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The exact parameters would obviously depend on the user and use case; but it generally seems to be the case that the more users that "reply all" would imply the less likely it is that you actually mean to hit "reply all".
Senders could also do their bit by using the BCC field, rathe
Re:Why do we even have that lever? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Hidden isn't necessary, but it should come with a pop up asking if you're sure you want to reply all. Also the button shouldn't be right next to the reply button. As somebody else mentioned you don't have to hide the thing you can require an additional click to use it so that somebody is less likely to accidentally click on it when the mean to click reply.
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The confirmation should include the number of destinations. That's one extra click and a little reading to reply to the reasonable number people involved with a project, and one extra cancel button click when you realize that replying to everyone in the company isn't what you meant to do.
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Yeah, in GMail it's in the dropdown menu under the arrow next to the regular reply button. (used it intentionally when communicating with group project teams)
In the Zimbra implementation I'm looking at, it's right between Reply and Forward, but anyway, Reply All never cropped up as a problem for me anyway, sending or receiving.
Re: (Score:2)
As you indicate, that just trains people to click through them all.
Instead, your mail program should be able to learn what e-mail aliases you're in by checking the To and Cc headers against your actual address. The more mails you get addressed not explicitly to you, the more likely the address they are addressed to is a list (usually the To address rather than a Cc). Thus, whenever you do a Reply All, it uses the learned weights of addresses to present you with a list of the recipients with any aliases pres
Re: (Score:3)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( x ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( x ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( x ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect th
Re: (Score:2)
How much do you think such a proposal would cost, say, Bruce Schneier when he sends out his Crypto-Gram newsletter [schneier.com] to people that have requested it?
Or how about the Linux Kernel Mailing List [lkml.org]?
Or the messages Slashdot can send you when someone replies to or moderates your comment? [See the Account link at the top of the screen.]
($0.001 per email) * (many many emails to which the recipient has opted-in) = a lot of money for list owners to pay.
I don't want to see the mailing lists I like all go behind paywalls