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The Military

US Army Officer Reply-All Email Chain Causes Pandemonium (military.com) 68

Posted by BeauHD from the hilarity-ensues dept.
An anonymous officer writes in an opinion piece via Military.com: It was the "reply-all" heard around the world. Around 06:30 Eastern time Feb. 2, approximately 13,000 Army inboxes pinged with an email from an unfamiliar sender. It was from a U.S. Army captain, asking to be removed from a distribution list. It initially seemed as though some unfortunate soul had inadvertently hit "reply-all" and made an embarrassing mistake. What followed can really be described only as professional anarchy, as thousands of inboxes became buried in an avalanche of email replies. Someone appears to have unwittingly edited an email distribution list, entitled "FA57 Voluntary Transfer Incentive Program," routing replies back to the entire list.

Most Army officers receive emails from human resources managers from time to time, usually sent using the blind copy (BCC) address line with replies routed to specific inboxes, preventing someone from accidentally triggering the mayhem that unfolded Feb. 2. The voluntary incentive program list, however, hadn't been so prudently designed and, in addition to 13,000 Army captains and some newly promoted majors, a single chief warrant officer, a Space Force captain and a specialist began to have their inboxes groan under the weight of inbound traffic. Within a few short hours of the initial email, predictable hilarity ensued. Hundreds of Army captains were sending emails asking to be removed from the distro list. In short order, hundreds of other captains replied, demanding that everyone stop hitting "reply-all" and berating their peers' professionalism (oblivious to the fact that they were also part of the problem). Many others found humor in the event, writing poems, sending memes and adding snarky comments to the growing dumpster fire. Before long, the ever-popular U.S. Army WTF! Moments Facebook page picked up on the mayhem and posted one of the memes that had been circulating in the email thread.

By 7 p.m. Eastern time, more than 1,000 emails had been blasted out to this massive group of Army officers. Those in different time zones (like Hawaii) came into work and were quickly overwhelmed by the deluge of emails clogging their inboxes. Some of the humorless officers resorted to typing in all caps "PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS DISTRO," prompting at least two to three sarcastic replies in return. Other captains took the opportunity to blast out helpful (or not so helpful) instructions on how to properly create email sorting rules in Outlook. A few intrepid officers tried to Rickroll everyone, and one even wrote new lyrics to the tune of an Eminem song. A particularly funny officer wrote a Nigerian prince scheme email and blasted it out to the group. Eventually, someone created and shared a Microsoft Teams group to move the devolving conversation to a new forum, quickly amassing more than 1,700 members. What started off as a gloriously chaotic email chain quickly turned into one the largest and most successful professional networking opportunities most of us have ever seen. Officers from multiple branches and functional areas across the globe took to the Microsoft Teams page, sharing useful products, making professional connections, and generally raising everyone's esprit de corps. The group's creator even started a petition to promote the one specialist who was inadvertently added to the distro list.
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US Army Officer Reply-All Email Chain Causes Pandemonium More

US Army Officer Reply-All Email Chain Causes Pandemonium

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  • Well, it seems obvious... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Evidently, the US Army Captain's Career Course, which I understand is required before promotion to that grade, does not cover e-mail etiquette. Maybe in the future it will? From the outside, I have to say... this whole blow up sounds hilarious. Good thing nothing important is happening in the world right now. They'll likely want to address this before we start participating in Operation Russian Repulsion in Ukraine. (Because though I've been out for years, you and I both know they've pulled out the Rus

    • It's been around twenty-five years since Microsoft's Bedlam3 e-mail storm took down Microsoft's own exchange servers. Let's face it... human nature being what it is, no amount of training is going to be enough to keep people from reply-to-all-ing. Or at least, a large enough percentage of them will still hit Reply-All, for whatever reason, including lambasting other to stop using Reply-All.

      Exchange is supposed to have code that recognizes and blocks (or throttles?) such e-mail storms before they bring dow

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        New Outlook feature: If you're going to "reply all" to more than 10 people you should be required to click "OK" on the "Are you sure you want to send this" dialog for each person on the distro list.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hjf ( 703092 )

          The problem is that usually there's a distro-list address that amplifies to 10K inboxes...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Pascoea ( 968200 )
            I'm still ok with it. How about one click per address in the "to" and "cc" list? Bcc doesn't count. Obviously I'm being facetious, but it would sure cut down on the cc storm bs we've all dealt with.

    • I have experienced the same issue when I worked at another place.

      Some people don't know how email works or the difference beteeen Reply and Reply All and just hits Reply All to be sure.

      • I have experienced the same issue when I worked at another place.

        Some people don't know how email works or the difference beteeen Reply and Reply All and just hits Reply All to be sure.

        Every place I have worked has had a reply-allmaggedon. If it's a topic not likely to get repeated a rule deals with it.

        A properly designed user interface would make hitting reply all harder than reply and possibly warn people they are "sending the response to xx people, do you really want to piss them all off?" That way, if they hit yes you know who to hit with a clue by four.

    • Evidently, the US Army Captain's Career Course, which I understand is required before promotion to that grade

      Close, but not quite.

      Students at the course range from 1st Lieutenants who are very close to promotion to mid-grade Captains (2 years or even more time in grade).
      This is especially true for reserve component officers (Army Reserve & Army National Guard). This is due to funding levels that can change annually, number of slots to the school, ability of officer to attend due to work, family, etc.

      ... does not cover e-mail etiquette. Maybe in the future it will?

      I really doubt that they have time to add that to the curriculum. Yeah, it would only be a 1 hour block, but

  • ...and a boring day has some hilarity, while also pissing off with people with no sense of humor. And - this would have been a great story for slashdot, had it been around in 1987.

    • My organization (like most others) had a situation like this a few years ago. This prompted headquarters to dictate that all mail groups with more than 50 recipients had to have an "allowed senders" list, and it could NOT just be left set to group members or public. It took a few years for the organization to become used to thinking about who could "blast" emails to large groups and using BCC when replies were not needed by the entire group.

      These things happen in waves and I'm sure the "allowed senders" r

      • Re:People take opportunity to find Humor.... (Score:5, Funny)

        by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Saturday February 11, 2023 @08:37AM (#63284351)

        I accidently caused something like this back in the 1990s when I mis-setup a mailman install for the university I worked at for use as a mailing list but somehow my customizations broke it and turned it into a regular mailing list with no ability to filter reply mails, and a mail out set off half the universities out of office mailers causing a cascade of bounce mails and 100,000+ emails bouncing around 10,000+ in-boxes.

        I was down at the university tavern when it triggered, and ran into the server room at warp speed and yanked so hard on the server power I toppled the rack.

        Then went back down to the tavern and drank my entire body weight in beer.

    • In the mid 90's the company I worked for had an email address list that could be mailed to from the outside that propagated to every employee (500+ users).

      A prankster handed that mail address to someone looking for an apartment. So first a mail came "I'm looking for an apartment", a while later a mail came "I'm going to kill my brother for giving me this mail address."

    • Re:People take opportunity to find Humor.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Saturday February 11, 2023 @03:48AM (#63284083)

      Some of the humorless officers resorted to typing in all caps "PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS DISTRO,"

      Now if only systemd would ask that...

  • I mean, this is one of the most basic mistakes you can make: Automatically send out replies to a large list to everybody on the list.

    • On Xmas morning a friend included me in a group SMS wishing season's greetings. Just as I was thinking, here come some replies from people I don't even know, my ex replied all. Groan.

      • OMG, don't remind me. NOTHING sucks more than stupid group texting threads.

        I had this happen to me by someone who through it would be "cute" to amuse or annoy a lot of people at the same time. All freaking day, stupid followup responses, interrupting my peace. Thankfully, Textra treats these as a single, separate thread, and has an "ignore" setting, which stopped all notifications on it.

        Unfortunately, this person did it again weeks later. I asked her to please send such stuff to me via Email, but not te

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        Oh god, yeah, the "family group text". I'm on the one that includes my crazy aunt where I get the "Happy Make a Friend Day! I love you all. XOXOXOXO! Hope you're all doing well! Love Auntie" crap. And then the shit storm that follows because everybody is too nice to ignore it. 300 messages later we're all caught up on everyone's ailments and animals, and I've considered throwing my phone into the nearest river. (I'm not allowed to turn the damn thing off... Work phone, and all.) But I've been married for

      • On Xmas morning a friend included me in a group SMS wishing season's greetings. Just as I was thinking, here come some replies from people I don't even know, my ex replied all. Groan.

        Not an SMS but I got included on a political discussion list, composed of people I did not know, that was way off of my political beliefs. After several nice attempts of the "Please remove my email" nature; I started countering their arguments in ever increasing snarky ways. Eventually they got pissed and proclaimed they were "banishing me from the discussion." Mission accomplished.

    • About 30 years ago I used a company-internal email system that said, "too many recipients - we will make you a mailing list" around 25 or so.

      This was ostensibly for message-storage efficiency (each copy on a list only got a reference to a single storage object) but in retrospect we never had reply-all storms either.

    • A properly configured mailing list has permission controls to restrict who can send mail to the list. Just because you receive a group message does not mean you should be authorized to send one.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. And anybody that actually has a look into how these things work knows that.

        • I'm sad that all those people suffered the inconvenience of a flooded mailbox, but I'm happy to know that it was a powerful learning experience for all of them to NOT REPLY ALL.

    • Apparently the US Army has incompetent list admins

      Unfortunately, all it really takes is one incompetent list admin.

  • sigh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Friday February 10, 2023 @10:14PM (#63283681)

    I'm torn over whether it is a good thing or not that 13000 Army Officers had nothing better to do than emailing memes and hitting up Teams chats. I guess I'm glad they aren't actively killing people at the moment.

    • It takes about 20 seconds to reply to an email. Look, I just replied to this comment and it only took me 15 seconds.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      I'm just glad there's some sense of humor left. People in direct control of bombs and missiles really should have some "creative" outlets for frustration on an otherwise shitty day.

  • Back when Gawker media was a thing, one of their sites - maybe Deadspin - posted an article about this subject. It was referred to as "Replyocalypse." It was an insight into the lack of thought between "reply" and "reply to all."

    I am on a board of directors where it never ceases to amaze me how many to r-t-a. Example, "we are going to Chez Paul, please pick from the list what you would like for dinner after the meeting." I respond directly to the admin. Meanwhile, including the board chair, give their choic

    • Clearly it wasn't used in this case; but there are mechanisms for controlling this sort of thing because you can't expect people to do it(at least not reliably enough; when you've got thousands of users each getting 10s to hundreds of emails a day even fairly reliable ones screw up too often to be relied upon).

      On the exchange side you can both set restrictions on who can send to a given distribution list; so ones that are used more or less as broadcast mechanisms simply won't let you reply-all; as well a

  • is somewhere around 26 to 28.

    Not quite the 22 year old 2nd lieutenant, but close enough for government work.

  • I was involved in a similar situation many years ago. The problem was the original message was sent to a distribution list that was set up so that if you hit reply it would send a message to the distribution list not the person sending the message. They finally had to shut down the whole email system and purge the messages.

    • They finally had to shut down the whole email system and purge the messages.

      And nothing of value was lost...

    • I ram into the problem once that someone had Added the distribution list itself to a distribution list. When the first message was sent to that list, IT managed to stop it after 7 iterations.

  • Welcome to the world's greatest military (Score:3)

    by Sitnalta ( 1051230 ) on Saturday February 11, 2023 @12:01AM (#63283819)

    I'm in the USAF. This happens all the time, and it's absolutely hilarious each time it happens. It's always from some mid-tier officer or senior enlisted. Last time they had to completely take down the email servers and purge the email chain from everybody's account because people started replying with memes.

  • The company I work for had a similar incident nearly twenty years ago. As a result we implemented permissions so that only a handful of senior people to send to our largest distribution lists. I assume almost everyone does the same. Why didn't/doesn't the army.
    • Same reason the USAF has Delve on various Sharepoint 365 sites with THOUSANDS of contacts. Someone isn't following their own NIST RMF security control implementations of least privilege and access lists.

  • This legendary story happened decades ago at MS. It was called the Bedlam DL3 email storm. “I survived Bedlam DL3” shirts were made.
    MS decided to fix it only 3 years ago: https://www.theverge.com/2020/... [theverge.com]

    • And I wonder, MS should have fixed it then, so no such storms could happen again. Apparently not, as hundreds of not very smart army captains found a way to do it again. Or they don't use MS email backend, doubtful though. But I suspect, that this is just a vaguely funny PR stunt, reminding of real Bedlam 3 when it really was funny and stressful, and not a legitimate Bedlam.
  • "Me, too!"

  • Why is this news? (Score:3)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday February 11, 2023 @06:18AM (#63284225)

    13000 people in a reply all email chain is kids stuff. 1000 emails in 12 hours? Please! I'm sure every Slashdotter here who works in a company with more than 50k employees has seen an email storm bigger than that multiple times a year.

    Heck this is so prevalent that Microsoft rolled out a reply-all storm protection feature in Exchange 4 years ago.

  • Python (Score:3, Funny)

    by end rant ( 7141579 ) on Saturday February 11, 2023 @07:17AM (#63284287)
    Do not worry, the trouble makers hitting reply-all have been sacked. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked. The intrepid officers who continued the emails after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.

  • I started a new job in June of 2022. The first week I was there, I created multiple rules for various senders. Because of who the e-mails are coming from, I am guaranteed to occasionally miss some important information, but I will not suffer the daily deluge of "health tips," "save the date," and other work-related propaganda. What bothers me most is the arrogance of these people to believe that everyone in an organization needs to see what they send, and the idiocy of not using a separate account for com

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hjf ( 703092 )

      What surpises me is actually the arrogance of people screaming to be removed from lists.

      I understand the frustration of being added to a list you don't want to be a part of. BUT, it's your work email. You don't get to choose which emails you get. If you want to ignore the corporate-spam you're free to.

      I worked briefly for a company where someone accidentally sent a rather-wide-group email and caused a waterfall of EXTREMELY angry employees demanding to be removed. If I was in charge at the time, I would hav

      • That's a decent argument, especially you're 3rd point, which which I completely agree.

        On one hand, those who haven't invested the time to learn how to create e-mail rules do sort of deserve to subjected to every speck of digital effluent sent their way.

        On the other hand, there's the Gen Z approach, which I absolutely love: just uninstall your e-mail client.

  • We have new super Russian E-mail Bomb. It will jam communication among all your officers!

    We Russians will will ze war yet using your own stupidity! Da or Nyet?

  • Maybe this isn't common for the military, but this specific brand of cluster**** is extremely common in the logistics industry. I do some contracting work for a truck matching service...and the addresses people are supposed to route to for truck information regular get blasted by massive chains like this. It's rare a week goes by without it happening at least once.

  • Mailing list has people that shouldn't be on it + mailing list accidentally configured to allow anyone to send e-mails to it to distribute = e-mail server implosion

    Bonus points if some of the people sending to the mailing list accidentally turn read receipts on lol.

  • We had this happen back at a previous employer about 7-8 years ago. Someone accidently sent an email to a corporate wide email list and it was a message that only a certain group needed to see. It was a simple mistake that most people wouldn't do, but it very obviously can happen. The email contained nothing bad, nothing "classified" nor "eyes only" within corporate. It was just crap particular to one group or team that 99% of the entire workforce did not need to see.

    Shit happens. Most reasonable people shr

    • This is literally "Hanlon's Razor" in action. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

  • I've never liked e-mail lists, it's just a poor way to have a multi-way discussion, especially "reflector" style lists. The only good thing is that a few interesting ones got archived 10-20 years ago, and sometimes will still have a useful answer to a question. And they usually appear in multiple places (often from people stealing content for SEO), while a forum would likely have fallen over either before archive.org existed, or implemented in CGI such that it was un-crawlable.

    Leaving "group" addresses ope

  • Microsoft took themselves out years ago. It's known as Bedlam DL3.

    https://techcommunity.microsof... [microsoft.com]

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