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Microsoft Communications

Microsoft Launches New Office 365 Features Blocking Reply-All Email Storms (zdnet.com) 60

Posted by EditorDavid from the mass-emailings dept.
Microsoft has begun rolling out a new feature in Office 365 to help IT staff stop the scourage that is "Reply-All email storms." ZDNet reports: The feature started rolling out this week to all Office 365 users worldwide. In its current form, Microsoft says the "Reply All Storm Protection" feature will block all email threads with more than 5,000 recipients that have generated more than 10 Reply-All sequences within the last 60 minutes. Once the feature gets triggered, Exchange Online will block all replies in the email thread for the next four hours, helping servers prioritize actual emails and shut down the Reply-All storm.

Microsoft said it would also continue working on the feature going forward, promising to add controls for Exchange admins so they can set their own storm detection limits.Other planned features also include Reply-All storm reports and real-time notifications to alert administrators of an ongoing email storm so that they can keep an eye on the email server's status for possible slowdowns or crashes.
The article notes Microsoft has experienced two different "Reply-All email storms" internally witin the last 18 months which included more than 52,000 employees, "who ended up clogging the company's internal communications for hours."

A post on Microsoft's Exchange blog now says "We're already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply all storms within Microsoft."
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Microsoft Launches New Office 365 Features Blocking Reply-All Email Storms More

Microsoft Launches New Office 365 Features Blocking Reply-All Email Storms

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  • two different "Reply-All email storms" internally witin the last 18 months which included more than 52,000 employees, "who ended up clogging the company's internal communications for hours." So MS experienced this? What about all the issues in their products their customers have experienced? The resolutions to these issues don't seem to come so fast.

    • Re:"Microsoft has experienced... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anachronous Coward ( 6177134 ) on Sunday May 10, 2020 @10:31AM (#60043818)
      I wonder what percentage of the reply-alls were simply telling people to stop replying to all.

      • We had one at work last year. The answer is most of them.

        The better question is "Do people actually Reply All to an email with thousands of recipients with a read receipt request attached?" and the answer to that is unfortunately some people do!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Just limit the number of recipients you can add to the To: or Cc: field. The rest can (and should) go into the Bcc: field. Problem solved.

    • Re:There's an easier fix (Score:5, Insightful)

      by redback ( 15527 ) on Sunday May 10, 2020 @10:00AM (#60043746)

      To: MassiveMailingList@yourcompany.com

      Problem not solved.

      • OK, set a flag, No-Reply-All=True.

        Senders set this or are held responsible for there actions.

        Outlook would obey the flag. All happy. Job done.

        • Re:There's an easier fix (Score:5, Informative)

          by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Sunday May 10, 2020 @11:40AM (#60044004)
          If you're going to require the sender to do that, then just have the sender send the email that is likely to be responded to by all (like a broadcast message) to himself, and BCC everyone else. Only one person gets the response (if any), and it doesn't disturb all the other people who don't care.
          • Our company has a policy that any email list with more than 50 recipients must have a restricted sender list. The larger the list, the smaller the allowed sender list is.

            Any list that sends to 52,000 employees would probably be limited to only 5 key people in management. A list of 60 employees would probably be limited to only the employees in the list (department lists, team lists, etc). Using nested lists complicates this approach, but that's what mail administrators are paid to configure.

            ---

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        One company I did work for had that exposed publically. Then someone sent a mail to that address asking if someone could help with getting an apartment. A short while after there was another mail "I will kill my brother for giving me that mail address".

      • Mailing list should be properly configured to only allow sending by "a few" users or by having an approval process. The 20 year old listserv software we use at work does this, why can't anything modern?

        • Our company wide mailing list is restricted to a few people. Weâ(TM)re on Office 365. Iâ(TM)ve wonder what is weâ(TM)re doing differently behind the scenes, or if thereâ(TM)s some other issues with these mark storms?

        • Mailing list should be properly configured to only allow sending by "a few" users or by having an approval process. The 20 year old listserv software we use at work does this, why can't anything modern?

          In my experience it's because someone important but not on the list didn't want to deal with the processes and found someone who didn't have the past experience to know better helped them out. (for the record my experience was being the person they found)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 89cents ( 589228 )
        Restrict the massive distribution lists to certain approved senders.
        Optional but not needed: Have them BCC: MassiveMailingList@yourcompany.com instead.
        Problem solved.

    • There are already kilobyte-size limits to these fields, so you could in fact just use a really really long domain name/subdomain .

      Not sure why 5k mails w/ 10 reply-alls is the cut-off - seems kinda excessive. Why not have it system-admin configurable?

  • Whoever thought Reply-All was an nice option to have should be shot. Remove that button and fill the To field consciously.

    • The lack of reply-all is already a problem in business communication. Several email providers nowadays have it disabled by default. I have had to repeatedly educate every new team member to keep people cc-ed when they reply, as they need to be part of the message exchanges. (We often cc secretaries, technical staff, accountants, vendors, etc. - it's the usual way of solving everyday business questions that involve more than two persons. Often not everybody knows everybody, so the correct culture is to keep

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • suspicious timing (Score:4, Funny)

    by Reverend Green ( 4973045 ) on Sunday May 10, 2020 @10:38AM (#60043832)

    As the mendacious narrative underlying the Covidiot tyrannies begins to unravel, Big Tech's efforts at censorship have shifted into high gear. Big Brother Google is going wild removing videos and manipulating search results. Faceboot has announced measures to censor political protest events and make it more difficult to spread samizdat information by WhatsApp and Messenger.

    So I can't help wondering if this is Microsoft's effort to prevent the masses from communicating freely, in order to stifle political opposition to the Covidiot tyrannies and the crimes against humanity they're perpetrating.

    • Cool story, but I’m having some difficulty visualizing it. Could you help me out by telling me what color the sky is in your world?
  • Thank God that's been fixed. It takes an act of God to get things fixed at Microsoft. Waiting for the patch to fix the security hole they probably made fixing it. It's all good.

    • not fixed if it's 5,000 users or any other arbitrary number or set timespan. These useless twats should have that as settable parameters... fucking incompetent primates over at Microsoft

      • Better than the "fucking incompetent primate" in the comment above this one who assumes it's not configurable. I mean, what a "twat" right? That guy's a real piece of shit...

  • reply all should be policy based (Score:3)

    by Tangential ( 266113 ) on Sunday May 10, 2020 @11:26AM (#60043956) Homepage
    I'd like to see a policy controlling reply all confirmation that could be set for an organization. It would have a tunable lower threshold of say X or more recipients (default 5) but less than that is not controlled. It should also have a tunable number of confirmation dialogs (default 4) to satisfy before actually sending a reply all with a value of 0 meaning reply all is not allowed.

  • I survived bedlamDL3 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Batzerto ( 543710 ) on Sunday May 10, 2020 @11:27AM (#60043964)
    I worked for Microsoft in the late 90s around the time Exchange 4.0 shipped (which was the first version). One day the whole company started getting emails sent to this mysterious alias named bedlamdl3. Way too many people replied to the message asking why they were on the DL, then came the unsubscribe messages, then the pleas to stop replying all, then the whole system shut down. It took a couple days to flush the emails out of the system and get things back to normal. By that time simeone had made T-shirts made that said "I survived Bedlam DL3". And now, more than 20 years later, we finally have a fix. As my former boss used to say, "Moving at the speed of business".

  • This is only really a problem with Garbage E-Mail systems. Microsoft Exchange is one of them, and is not suitable for any use case whatsoever. This is not treating the "root cause" of the problem (using a retarded e-mail system) but rather is merely what we call "a bag on the side" to collect the overflowing shit.

    The correct solution is to not use Microsoft Exchange. Then the problem will not occur.

    • I worked for a large organization that used DEC All-In-One on VAXen. If I remember correctly, there was only a single instance of an email's content. All the addresses received were links. That was because desks didn't have PCs sitting on them. They had video terminals. Remember Wyse? Termcap is the Linux legacy of that era.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ...the "Reply All Storm Protection" feature will block all email threads with more than 5,000 recipients that have generated more than 10 Reply-All sequences within the last 60 minutes.

    That's the kind of shit-storm they need to see before they activate something? That right there should tell you the incompetence level tolerated at Microsoft.

    If you need more than a few dozens people in your CC list, you should be using a mailing list.

    • If you need more than a few dozens people in your CC list, you should be using a mailing list.

      They mean "recipients" literally, as in the number people who actually get the email which is not the same as the number of e-mail addresses on the To or Cc fields. The cited "Bedlam DL3" was a "distribution list" (Microsoft-speak for "mailing list.")

  • You should be able to send emails that stop all 'reply alls'

  • This is a really bad idea (Score:4, Funny)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday May 10, 2020 @05:13PM (#60045308)

    I for one think Reply-All email storms serve a very important purpose. Writing down the names of people who hit reply all and type "Take me off your mailing list" is important when management tells you that it's time to cut 1000 jobs.

  • Make it so if there are multiple entries in To or CC, that it simply generates an individual e-mail to EACH entry, "under the hood" and sends them out separately.
    They could even link them all so you could filter for the e-mail down the road.

  • No one should be allowed to send an email to that many people, period.

    A reply-all storm involving just 20 people is bad enough!

  • Is this ignorant Millennials coming in and not understanding how email works?

    This wasn't a big issue for the first three decades of email. Not to say it wasn't an issue, but people seemed to understand they needed to stop reply-all'ing.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      Haven't you hit reply all instead of reply? I've done it... and when it was sent to everyone - CRAP!

      • Yes, but it's never led to multiple days of Reply Alls in response. It generally dies down after a few emails.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

          Yes, but it's never led to multiple days of Reply Alls in response. It generally dies down after a few emails.

          I'd be horrified if that happened to me. Reply all when you wanted to just reply to makes you feel like an idiot. Causing a reply-all storm... OMG. That's when you become "That guy."

  • Okay, I am just an engineer and I recognize that these may be trouble for admins, but hear me out. I've experienced two email storms in the last 4 quarters and they have both been one of the highlights of their respective weeks. I can't be the only person who finds them massively amusing, can I?

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