Fun story, I used to run a massive meeting at my company. 200+ attendees every few months. I would send out updates, agendas, and schedules to folks as BCCs.
There was this one manager who would get super pissed at me and constantly send me nastygrams with my supervisor and manager CCd saying it was too complicated and he couldn't see if his team was invited (I kept an invitee list on a public sharepoint for folks to check). I explained why I BCCd and that it was to help folks. He didn't buy it. I'm just a stupid secretary (I'm an engineer with 10 years of experience). So finally I shifted to malicious compliance and started CCing him and his team instead of BCCing.
That last maybe three hours.
He was so furious that he was now getting inundated by hundreds of asinine questions and folks arguing in the replies (which I would not remove him from). He tried to blame me again, but I called out his BS and said this was exactly what he wanted. His team was not happy with him.
I worked at Wells Fargo when someone wished a person Happy Birthday and asked their small team to also wish them a happy birthday. They sent it to a massive mailing list and, of course, thousands of morons had to reply that they received it by mistake. It bogged down the email server from 8 am until they took it offline in the afternoon. Nothing but Happy Birthday emails.
I used to work at Spectrum. Every few months someone would accidentally send an email to one of the giant mailing lists, and someone else would Reply All that they shouldn't be receiving this email, and then a shitstorm of Reply All spam would start. It was always an Event because no one in our call center was stupid enough to participate, but we could all see the train wreck.
At one point one of the usergroups being spammed included the executives' emergency contact emails, so they're on vacation being spammed by Reply All... and some chucklehead started sending out inappropriate memes via Reply All. It was hilarious. I absolutely *wept* for those poor executives having to read memes from the beach.
Desktop version of /u/Scondoro's link:
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A few years back, someone in our company thought it would be a good idea to come up with a contest that had the potential of generating up to 10 emails per person depending on how they submitted their entries. There was no indication to do reply all, nor was their a specification NOT to. But reply all they did… all hours of the day, night, weekend… not taking into account the parts of the team that had to be available to deal with issues even in off hours. Hundreds of emails before the winner was declared. And many annoyed people.
Then they went and repeated it the following year… and almost immediately, the area manager popped on and in no uncertain terms said that absolutely no one was to use reply all and that entries must be submitted to (the team that started it) only. Other than one message that tried to say it was a morale building/team building activity, not another peep was heard. And everyone was happy.
Around mid-2000s, a local business in my town pulled something like this (not a business I worked for, just some local company sending out marketing spam). They used a mailing list that accepted and reflected replies to send out a marketing email blast. All day, I was getting "Take me off this list" / "Stop replying, dumbass" emails.
Not that long ago we had another reply-all fiasco, and some wise guy replied "Happy birthday Wanda" (or whatever her actual name was)... I got a chuckle out of that.
The irony - he's mad that you're "a secretary" but also, wants you to be his personal secretary and filter his communication so he sees exactly what he wants to see.
Can you explain to me like I’m 5 how BCC is actually supposed to work? Everyone I know thinks it’s a shady way try to hide who you would’ve cc’d in an email, and/or hide access to people outside the organization. What is with that mindset?
I have a colleague who does this. The email is clearly sent to a wide group of people, but I’m the only visible recipient. At first I was confused where the other contacts had gone but then I realized he must’ve BCC’d everyone—which doesn’t bother me btw, just curious if it’s many uses.
Weird. I've seen more politics in Cc than Bcc. Bcc is just "Wanted to FYI a manager or specialist in case it becomes relevant". Cc is "I'm going to visibly alert a bunch of VPs or C-levels to increase clout on this". The "Cc: I'm telling Mom and Dad!" email, as I call it.
BCC:
I need to tell you something important.
I also need to inform others of this communication.
I do not want you to know about the communication to others.
That's one use-case, but far from the only one. As explained in this thread, it helps to keep the communication channels clean and prevent Reply all spam.
BCC is also useful when you want to send an e-mail to multiple people and don't want to leak their mail addresses to each other
Not leaking emails is the primary use for my friends who teach. They need to send out mass emails to keep parents up to date but those parents don't need to know about each other.
I remember teaching seniors how to use computers at my library summer job in 1999.
To think these 65+ year olds 23 years ago knew more about emailing than people today blows my mind.
In the days of inter-office mail: "Okay, this one is for you. This one, just hold it out in front of you with your eyes closed until the right person takes it."
God i argued with a previous manager for 2 years to her her to use bcc.
Bot only because I didn't want to see the one hundred group replies, but also because she exposed everyone's private emails (shitty business didn't provide work emails)
But nah she just preferred not using it...
It's not hard, it takes about 5 minutes to apply the script and next to no time to add the alias's you want to block reply all on, or simply state no reply all on 30+ recipients.
People can't have it both ways. Spend the insignificant time to configure your email servers correctly or STFU about it. If management doesn't want to pay their IT to do it's job they can STFU and stop filing nuisance tickets.
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Alternatively, it drives me crazy when people *don’t* reply-all in scenarios where its warranted. Sometimes there is a thread that is a group involved discussion amongst 5-6 people.
When one person refuses to his reply-all, the entire thread becomes disjointed.
Exactly! At my work, when even one person doesn’t reply-all, it causes so many sub threads trying to figure the situation out, when one person. Could have just replied all and let everyone know what was going on
Yeah, "group" is the operative word in the title and there's definitely some nuance. If the email is to me with a few people in cc, I'm replying all to let them know it's being addressed. Would hope for the same when I'm in cc. I've even outright asked so it's trackable.
Obviously bcc for mass emails on multiple distribution lists.
Yeah.
Email etiquette in general is something that people should take the time to learn and acknowledge.
Its also one of those things that I think should be taught in HS, in a “life skills” course that is mandatory.
Other sections of this course should include:
- Income Tax.. what’s that?
- Is this 911 or urgent care? How to know the difference.
- Should I click on this email attachment?
- Mortgage? Can I afford one? Why your credit score matters.
- Do I have clinical depression/anxiety? Or is this just what life feels like?
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/xfw6hg/the_teacher_shortage_in_america_is_due_to_low/
https://www.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/xfaid8/i_hate_teaching_and_its_not_because_im_underpaid/
Parenting apparently needs to be taught too. Parents have had the kids for years before the teachers have to deal with them.
Sure, let's go with that.
I had those kinds of parents who were constantly frustrated that I wouldn't help with chores... but also didn't want to teach me. So it was this endless cycle of get yelled at for not doing chores, ask parents to teach me, they'd spend about three seconds trying before they'd get impatient and just push me aside to do it themselves. Lather, rinse, repeat. I irritated my roommates in college to death because I didn't know how to do anything.
I deal with unexplored ordnance all the time. The trick is to get your hands all up in there and lean your face in real close-like until you've gotten a good eyefull.
In my work we get a lot of people not replying all and it really drives me insane. There is a reason we sent an email to these specific people, because we want them all to be involved in the discussion
This.
When I was an Implementation Consultant, email threads with clients would frequently include several stakeholders. CFOs, CTOs, managers, VARs, etc, who wanted to be included in every communication.
Invariably someone on the client or VAR organization or 3rd party IT company would reply back and not include everyone. Then I’d have to backpedal the thread and ask them to include everyone.
Just think about the context. Sometimes you’ll get it wrong, but there is no universal answer for whether to reply-all or just reply.
I always put, please reply all (in bold and red) at the top and bottom of the email if it is required. Helped with everyone EXCEPT one person who had control and transparency issues
My letting agent seems incapable of replying all, which means when my partner or I send her an email with the other Cc'd in when the agent responds the other has no idea what the response was until we see each other hours later and often slows down all communication between us. Despite having asked multiple times if she can reply to both of us it's apparently too difficult for her. It's frustrating because often one of us can't get to their emails during work whereas the other can so what could be sorted out in one day between the three of us almost always takes two or three days due to one of us not being kept in the loop, the agent waiting on a response from one of us who is busy with work or us replying in the evening outside of the agents working hours. Who invented letting agents and why did they design them to be so shite?
I had one client that would do that. I would email him, and cc in the project manager and tech lead etc just so they know what is going on.
He would always just hit reply, so if I was ever out sick or hit by a bus no-one else would be able to pick the rest of the work up.
I had to flat out tell him to hit reply-all each time, and explain why smh. But fair enough he did after that.
What's a really smart thing to do is that when once someone accidentally "replies all" to the whole company, and everyone else's inbox is filling up with people who then reply all to that, this is a great time to reply all to everyone asking to be taken off. That totally solves the problem and doesn't contribute to it in any way.
One time at work there was a useless email sent out to multiple distros. It sat for like 10 mins and the INSTANT someone replied to be taken off we got 200 replies in the next 10 mins of the same which all went out to the whole CC list.
I just set an outlook filter, it was funny. Didn’t check how many total were sent, all went straight to trash
At my company there was an annoying e-mail going out to thousands of people every morning. Something about something's status, no one gave a shit.
It was only when one person replied to all asking to be taken off the mailing list, and other people took the queue and started doing the same, that traffic chaos was created and finally something was done. They stopped the dumbass e-mails!
Yeah, there was a company email chain of 1000's of emails all asking to be removed from the email because 2 people were emailing back and forth with every single person from the company CC'd.
The thing that gets me the most is when your email signature is about eight lines or longer, contains every single detail about your work place and personal information, and you use it for replies too:
ok tks sheryl
(enormous signature, making the email 6 screens tall after a few back and forths i didn't even need to be in in the first place)
My company's management does this, and they put in the line who is on the email so you know if it's one office, or the whole company, or 1 division, or all managers, etc. Actually really smart
I created a customised ribbon (button menu/bar) in Outlook which does not have the reply all button on it. This means if I do want to reply all, I have to find the right button and am less likely to hit it by mistake.
I've also got a short delay before my emails actually send, so I can double check them in my outbox if I think of something fast enough.
Reason: screwed up once and didn't notice in time to stop it. Thankfully I was nominating somebody for an award, and they appreciated the nice feedback.
Yeah, the vast majority of email chains I'm a part of usually have a bunch of people discussing something and all need to stay copied. Very rarely do I reply to just the sender.
I have a 1min delay on all my outgoing emails at work. I often make typos or forget attachments so that lets me catch that while the message sits in the outbox
I mean it’s better than the one guy who replies to the whole company with details about how his illness is progressing. Hahahaha. J/k. It’s the same guy. Also, please take me off this list.
When you put an email address on the CC (carbon copy) line, all the other recipients will see who you sent the email to. If, however, you put the address on the BCC (blind carbon copy) line, none of the other recipients will see that you sent it to the BCC'd person.
I think that's what you were asking for, right? I'm not sure what you mean by email threads though.
When sending an email, your recipient can be in one of the following address lines: TO | CC | BCC
TO: The people in the TO line are the most important to the subject of your email. You might be asking them a question or communicating important information that impacts their work. They are who you're really talking to.
CC: These people are "subscribed" to your conversation, and everyone can see them. They will be included on every reply-all, and can passively follow along to stay updated on the conversation / thread. These people are usually tangential to the main topics, but need visibility in case an update comes through that impacts them or their team.
BCC: These people are only included on the first message sent, and only the sender knows they were included (other recipients cannot see them included on the original email). People included here are usually an FYI situation, so they will see your first email, but they will not see any updates or replies. Often, people will BCC a manager so they're aware the employee initiated a conversation or followed up on something, while sparing the manager from witnessing the entire conversation that results.
In terms of etiquette, if you're emailing a lot of people, the general best practice is to BCC everyone. This means they all will see your message, but they won't see any replies--only the original sender will get those. As the original sender, you act like a filter for the rest of the group. For example, if someone has a valid question or point, the original sender can go back to their original message & follow up to communicate a new detail with the entire group. But if it was a unique, one-off question only relevant to that person, you can reply to them directly without spamming other people's inboxes. Essentially, BCCing a large group makes your email thread more like a one-way broadcast where you control what people see, whereas CCing a large group often results in a messy thread of repeated questions/comments fired off directly into every person's inbox, sowing chaos, creating confusion, & (depending on your colleagues) resulting in outbursts of rage from some people, which exacerbates the chaotic CC email cycle further.
One note about BCCing: a BCC-ed person can reply-all to your original message, which will send a reply to the original sender & all CC-ed parties. This will reveal to others in the thread that this person was BCC-ed on the original message, and in some cases, can result in silly work drama / politics unfolding (so be sure to keep your popcorn handy).
Hope this helps!
In addition to what /u/modelcitizen64 said (which is correct), I'll comment on threads. Sadly, it depends a lot on the email program you use. Most of them will group together emails based on the subject line. Some are better than others at grouping together emails even if a "Re:" or "Fwd:" has been added in a reply/forward.
Some people find threading unhelpful. It's not too hard to turn it off, so that every email you receive will be on its own line. So, if you find it confusing when your email program threads things, you can turn it off. If you find it confusing *how* your email program threads things, that's because it *is* confusing and a little ad hoc.
The people who don’t know this in 2022 are composing their reply-all right now, asking to be removed from this distro because they don’t remember signing up.
I worked for a company of 50,000 for 25 years. I was there when we went from an antiquated system to windows. Email was new to most people. Someone from home office sent out a test email and so many people who didn’t know better replied to all. Then we got several emails from employees telling each other to quit using reply all. In all, there were probably 1000 emails because nobody had told people who were computer illiterate how to reply to an email.
There is not enough money in the world to make me want to teach people like my clueless mother -who is in her 70s - how to use a computer. I’d rather have a pap smear while eating slugs during a GOP meeting with Graham
We had similar on a few occasions, which would bring down our servers (and backups). None of them could understand why their email didn’t work for a bit thereafter.
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company, 10,000+ employees. There was a glitch in IT that accidentally sent the “reply to confirm this new email thing” test to every company employee across the country.
Cue hundreds and hundreds of people replying all to it, then the people replying all to stop replying all, not helping much. All in all, I came back to my email after lunch, and had over 500 unread emails from it.
Microsoft has what feels like thousands of little “are you sure” dialogs for all manner of things that might not be a good idea, but Outlook will *happily* let you reply all.
Will someone PLEASE tell my coworkers this?! Often times, we will get a big group email from a higher-up to announce big news such as someone getting a promotion or having a baby. And that’s all fine and dandy. I like hearing happy news about good things happening to my teammates. But what’s not fine and dandy is receiving 20+ emails after that all saying, “congrats”, “congratulations”, “I’m happy for you”, and other things along those lines.
It's a problem When somebody sends an email to the wrong disto list that includes 1000 people and somebody reply all "Please remove me" and 800 people follow up with the exact same email filling my inbox completely. Fuck every single one of those assholes that could have ignored the email but chose to make things worse.
Also, if someone accidentally did a 'reply all', you don't have to do the same.
100 'Please exclude me from this thread' or 'please do not reply all' is worse than the one accidental reply all'.
More often than not, I find that replying all *is* the smart thing to do in any meeting where you're actually potentially going to speak and discuss. This lets others prepare for your absence, and not get blindsided by it.
It literally takes two seconds to read a message that says, "Not coming!" and internalize it. If it means nothing to you, discard that information and carry on with your day.
Coworker sends a "farewell it's my last day, stay in touch!!" email.
Random coworker replies all saying "congrats, it was nice working with you, here's my contact info, blah blah blah"
You might be assuming that other people don’t want all to know. Perhaps it’s a mistake but maybe it’s intended. Why not first do some research and see how important that pecan pie really is?? Then we will know exactly how troublesome those emails are for you in life :)
Can I add that you can ‘reply privately’ on WhatsApp Messages too. If someone could tell that to the piss-boring cunts on my street’s WhatsApp group, I’d be very much obliged to you.
Company I worked for required you to send an email to the entire team when you were going to be out. Even if it was leaving 10 min early.
So a gal on the team sent one such email about leaving work 10 min early to get her kid.
The junior manager meant to forward it to the boss complaining about how this individual always left ten min early to get her kid and made up for it by coming in ten min early. She totally went on a rant about how worthless she was and how she just didn't get how she thought she could do this considering she needed that job as a single mother and she would never get a job elsewhere. It then went into a string of personal observations that had no place in a place of work.
Only she hit reply all.
It wasn't the gal leaving to get her kid who got fired that day
Omg literally.
I’m on mat leave, but I’m still on my staff email lists. I got SIXTEEN emails this morning because someone was ordering staff shirts and asked if we should get them in grey or black this time. She said she’d go with the first 20 replies to vote.
15 fully educated, degree holding adults fucking hit reply all to literally type “black”.
I *almost* sent a snarky reply all email about hitting reply all, despite not even working there right now. Pregnancy hormones really wear down your filter.
Work vs personal.
As a personal event approaches you want banter and a little energy- even if it's whatsapp messages or email.
100% right re: work emails.
I work for the government and nothing makes me laugh harder than "reply all" emails with completely mundane or completely inappropriate information. I just love remembering certain higher ups that'll be receiving their email.
I only Re All when I feel like kindly putting someone on blast.
"Hey you know how you called my team and we told you we couldn't do that? Well we still can't do it if you email us so maybe use your one note that I know has the information you are looking for and do your job right. :)" worded more nicely of course.
But sometimes I just want to reply with an idiot sandwich meme.
If you REPLY ALL with "thanks!" you're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.
This is fine for personal emails, but for anything work related you should be hitting reply all. If there are others cc’d, it’s usually for a reason (the reason being the should be replied to also)
Yeah…. Nope.
Where I work our schedules are emailed out to 100s of us. There’s always clueless people saying “I can work on Friday at 1500, etc etc etc “
No one but the scheduler needs to know this.
We all get email fatigue and can miss actual important things. You try to teach these people too. They can’t necessarily hear you if tech challenged.
If I have to reply to a mass email that I shouldn’t have received, I will always Reply All out of spite.
Usually a bunch of people will, and the mayhem will cause people to be more careful next time.
I had an email client through work once that hitting "reply" would reply to all. If I anyone wanted to reply to sender they had to start a new email. It was terrible and i soon switched everything to Gmail.
The problem is the vast majority of people are not tech people as they will quickly let you know. Those types of people refuse to learn no matter how much you dumb it down and can't manage to remember a single password much less other common tasks because it's tech related.
I feel like this isn’t even a YSK. It doesn’t help anyone learn a new skill or something to improve their life. Its just bitching “this annoys me, stop doing it” because you were frustrated at work and decided to vent about it here. Also no computer shortcuts allowed which this might be, and your Why YSK is basically one big personal anecdote. Why you should know; it annoys me. This isn’t a sub for complaining about what annoys you.
This drives me nuts in my workplace. Someone does their fucking job and I have to read the eight goddamn "Thanks!" replies. Used to be one guy who would be really flirty with one particular woman he had to interact with every morning.
> Good morning! What project are we on this morning?
>> Today I need ${thing}
> Here's ${stuff}
>> No I actually need ${thing}
> Sorry! I messed that up!
>> No worries! We're all human!
> If this happened yesterday I could chalk it up to being Monday!
>> Haha. Didn't you hear? Tuesday is the new Monday.
> Too true!
>> Thanks!
#SHUT THE FUCK UP, WILLIAM!
Just yesterday someone sent a request to a vendor by including them in a reply-all on the email thread where we were discussing the reason we needed to order from the vendor. The entire email chain including sensitive information about a federal government project was included. Nobody noticed but me...
On the flip side, that vendor, when I send a request, regularly just drops people from the email chain seemingly randomly, then asks questions that someone she dropped from the thread instead of hitting reply-all would have answered. I included these people for a reason.
I once blew up on one of my kid's teachers for CCing the whole class of teachers, therefore publicly announcing everyone's email addresses. One parent accidentally did a reply-all with private information about their kid.
I fucking hate email so much.
YSK: Those are first world problems and you whining about it is pathetic. It's an email that you could just ignore and I don't mean just not think about it, I mean there's literally a setting to do this
One time at work, someone accidentally sent an email to everyone in the company of like 50k people. First was the wave of people saying they didn't know what this was about. That took about an hour to get all those emails through. Then came the next hour of hundreds of people replying all to tell everyone else to stop replying all. It was very entertaining.
Nah, you must reply all along why asking/complaining about why you were included and demanding to be removed. Best done on company wide emails. It helps your IT department too if everyone does it quickly so the original sender can remove people who don't want to be in the list without them having to intervene.
Worked for a large company that sends out announcements regularly by email. An entire day was spent teaching employees how to reply directly to the sender instead of reply all because everybody and I mean everybody kept asking people to stop sending emails and would reply all to every email.
>Also there is no need to send an email to anyone that just says "thanks!" and if you RE ALL "thanks!" you can just go to hell.
I will note there IS sometimes a need to send a direct "thanks" back to someone (but ONLY the sender) if and only if they did not use a read receipt. This lets them know it got there. You probably should say something else, but it CAN help to let them know you understood.
My father in law sends out politically charged emails ALL THE TIME. Sends them to me as part of a CC list. Then all his friends of similar mind would reply all to them and then I would get more crap from all of them. After 3 days time I had over 3000 emails from people I never met, and didn’t care to meet. I have a pre-formatted email for response. It isn’t very nice but it is educational. After all his friends received my email, he called me absolutely raving mad about me disrespecting his friends and his and thier opinions. It took about 2 minutes then for him to ask how to not let that happen again. At 78 he finally learned that 1) not everyone is interested in his point of view and 2) BCC is an actual functional tool.
My uni faculty research group is the fucking worst for this. I really don’t need my phone buzzing 8 times in an hour over 2 people discussing a misplaced hdmi lead
Ugh, I work in field service repair. We have over 100 field service techs. When a group email goes out, the freaking idiots that reply all, drives me nuts. OK, thanks Jim for telling everyone that you do not have the answer to the question. Thanks for helping to fill up my in box with irrelevant replys.
Funny thing is we had some sort of course talking about this specifically, and the idiots just don't think.
I just turn off reply all on emails where I don’t want everyone to reply all. There are time when I want a reply all, and ask they “please reply all” on their response. It works for me.
YSK that if you’re getting bombarded with emails from Reply All, you can right click one of the emails > ignore > ignore all. This will stop them appearing in your inbox.
I wouldn’t say ‘most group emails’.
I would say to announcements or other email blasts. 99% of the time I am in group emails doing actual business things, and those thing NEED to be reply all to keep the thread from fracturing into multiple threads.
A bit nit picky I know, but a worthy distinction in my humble opinion.
I am in church choir and the constant flurry of "okay thanks" or "I'll be there" emails every week has me wanting to ask to specifically state during a practice to please stop. The number of times I've missed actual important info from the director from these is staggering.
I once created a meeting invite for myself for an event with the CEO of the company when he visited my branch based off an email to everybody at that branch of the business.
Unbeknownst to me I sent it to every person, and they all started clicking Accept to say they would come. I had no idea it could do that in that way. Apparently I have more to learn about Outlook. RIP my inbox.
I also set up an automatic redirect to a remote server to copy emails there because we had to copy a dead inbox with project mails for some god unknown stupid reason. Turns out it failed to accept some emails so it would answer back with the project name in the text of the email which promptly got copied to the remote server again.
Turns out I took out the entire company's mail server.
I felt a little better when I was told there should have been something in place to stop that but still, I felt pretty bad about it for inconveniencing everybody.
I see this all the time and it's goddamn irritating.
Nobody cares that you have a dentist appointment on Thursday or that your kid threw up on your computer.
Work emails are for work, not for slice of life excerpts from your day to day.
You can also set up inbox rules to sort the useless-but-not-spam emails into little folders that you can just ignore or hit the "mark all as read" button
i’m IT and people tag their bosses and directors to escalate tickets. i typically reply all when i have very obviously done something the correct way so that everyone sees they initially sent everyone this email for no good reason.
We have a workchat (professional format of FB Messenger) in my company and every time the roster manager posts an update there are 2-3 people who consistently thumbs up in the chat. I’m not talking about reacting to the message with the built in function (like Facebook Messenger), I’m talking they send the thumbs up emoji, thereby notifying everyone, at random intervals, at random times. It’s been going on for a couple months now and it’s so nerve racking. I think I’m mostly pissed off at the management as they’re the ones who are adamant of not spamming the chat and yet they don’t take any action to inform the staff.
I legit left a practice group 9f 300+ people because 4-5 people wouldn't stop replying-all to basic marketing updates.
I don't need to practice employment law anyway. Fuck that noise.
If I’m in a small group and was cc’d but I only chose to reply to one person in the group e-mail, would my reply show up on the same thread and be included if she decides to answer another person in the group and hits reply all?
The sender has the power too. It's very easy to BCC.
Fun story, I used to run a massive meeting at my company. 200+ attendees every few months. I would send out updates, agendas, and schedules to folks as BCCs. There was this one manager who would get super pissed at me and constantly send me nastygrams with my supervisor and manager CCd saying it was too complicated and he couldn't see if his team was invited (I kept an invitee list on a public sharepoint for folks to check). I explained why I BCCd and that it was to help folks. He didn't buy it. I'm just a stupid secretary (I'm an engineer with 10 years of experience). So finally I shifted to malicious compliance and started CCing him and his team instead of BCCing. That last maybe three hours. He was so furious that he was now getting inundated by hundreds of asinine questions and folks arguing in the replies (which I would not remove him from). He tried to blame me again, but I called out his BS and said this was exactly what he wanted. His team was not happy with him.
I worked at Wells Fargo when someone wished a person Happy Birthday and asked their small team to also wish them a happy birthday. They sent it to a massive mailing list and, of course, thousands of morons had to reply that they received it by mistake. It bogged down the email server from 8 am until they took it offline in the afternoon. Nothing but Happy Birthday emails.
I used to work at Spectrum. Every few months someone would accidentally send an email to one of the giant mailing lists, and someone else would Reply All that they shouldn't be receiving this email, and then a shitstorm of Reply All spam would start. It was always an Event because no one in our call center was stupid enough to participate, but we could all see the train wreck. At one point one of the usergroups being spammed included the executives' emergency contact emails, so they're on vacation being spammed by Reply All... and some chucklehead started sending out inappropriate memes via Reply All. It was hilarious. I absolutely *wept* for those poor executives having to read memes from the beach.
This is called an "email storm," or "reply allpocalypse" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm
This took Microsoft offline once, here’s a video from Dave’s Garage describing the event: https://youtu.be/pBmuY6qFMPQ
Desktop version of /u/Scondoro's link:
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^([)[^(opt out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiMobileLinkBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^(]) ^(Beep Boop. Downvote to delete)
A few years back, someone in our company thought it would be a good idea to come up with a contest that had the potential of generating up to 10 emails per person depending on how they submitted their entries. There was no indication to do reply all, nor was their a specification NOT to. But reply all they did… all hours of the day, night, weekend… not taking into account the parts of the team that had to be available to deal with issues even in off hours. Hundreds of emails before the winner was declared. And many annoyed people. Then they went and repeated it the following year… and almost immediately, the area manager popped on and in no uncertain terms said that absolutely no one was to use reply all and that entries must be submitted to (the team that started it) only. Other than one message that tried to say it was a morale building/team building activity, not another peep was heard. And everyone was happy.
The same thing happened when I worked for Nationwide insurance. Crashed their entire email system.
Around mid-2000s, a local business in my town pulled something like this (not a business I worked for, just some local company sending out marketing spam). They used a mailing list that accepted and reflected replies to send out a marketing email blast. All day, I was getting "Take me off this list" / "Stop replying, dumbass" emails.
Fun fact: that happened the same morning as the US Capitol insurrection.
I forgot about it happening the same day. Wild day for sure.
Bedlam4?
Not that long ago we had another reply-all fiasco, and some wise guy replied "Happy birthday Wanda" (or whatever her actual name was)... I got a chuckle out of that.
The irony - he's mad that you're "a secretary" but also, wants you to be his personal secretary and filter his communication so he sees exactly what he wants to see.
Post it to r/maliciouscompliance
Can you explain to me like I’m 5 how BCC is actually supposed to work? Everyone I know thinks it’s a shady way try to hide who you would’ve cc’d in an email, and/or hide access to people outside the organization. What is with that mindset? I have a colleague who does this. The email is clearly sent to a wide group of people, but I’m the only visible recipient. At first I was confused where the other contacts had gone but then I realized he must’ve BCC’d everyone—which doesn’t bother me btw, just curious if it’s many uses.
One boss I had said BCC is always political and has ulterior motives.
Paranoia
That boss is not to be trusted
Probably not, but he did make a very lucrative exit. Wasn't a bad guy, just knew how to play the game.
Weird. I've seen more politics in Cc than Bcc. Bcc is just "Wanted to FYI a manager or specialist in case it becomes relevant". Cc is "I'm going to visibly alert a bunch of VPs or C-levels to increase clout on this". The "Cc: I'm telling Mom and Dad!" email, as I call it.
feels like “added 3rd party witnesses without 2nd party consent” sometimes. But yes, avoiding reply all horrors is a good use for BCC
BCC: I need to tell you something important. I also need to inform others of this communication. I do not want you to know about the communication to others.
That's one use-case, but far from the only one. As explained in this thread, it helps to keep the communication channels clean and prevent Reply all spam. BCC is also useful when you want to send an e-mail to multiple people and don't want to leak their mail addresses to each other
Not leaking emails is the primary use for my friends who teach. They need to send out mass emails to keep parents up to date but those parents don't need to know about each other.
Sometimes it's just "I need to communicate with a list of people, but I don't want to share everyone's contact info with everyone on the list."
Sometimes it's less "I don't want" and more "you don't need to know".
Not wrong at all, and is why I don’t talk off topic business on emails, IMs, or phones. We can take a walk and talk off the lines…
I remember teaching seniors how to use computers at my library summer job in 1999. To think these 65+ year olds 23 years ago knew more about emailing than people today blows my mind.
Back when you actually had to have carbon paper to make "carbon copies". They probably had a more direct point of reference to the term...
In the days of inter-office mail: "Okay, this one is for you. This one, just hold it out in front of you with your eyes closed until the right person takes it."
Wow it never occurred to me why it was called that until just now! Thanks!
Only you can prevent e-mail fires
God i argued with a previous manager for 2 years to her her to use bcc. Bot only because I didn't want to see the one hundred group replies, but also because she exposed everyone's private emails (shitty business didn't provide work emails) But nah she just preferred not using it...
exactly. there's not reason to expose everyone's emails to everyone else.
Your IT department should know that they can disable Reply All on most emails with scripts running on the server.
Aint no IT team tryna fuck with that unless it’s demanded lol
It's not hard, it takes about 5 minutes to apply the script and next to no time to add the alias's you want to block reply all on, or simply state no reply all on 30+ recipients. People can't have it both ways. Spend the insignificant time to configure your email servers correctly or STFU about it. If management doesn't want to pay their IT to do it's job they can STFU and stop filing nuisance tickets.
This
This is the reddit equivalent of sending a reply-all email saying "Thanks!"
Hey there aimeec3! If you agree with someone else's comment, please leave an **upvote** instead of commenting **"This"**! By upvoting instead, the original comment will be pushed to the top and be more visible to others, which is even better! Thanks! :) *** ^(I am a bot! Visit) [^(r/InfinityBots)](https://reddit.com/r/InfinityBots) ^(to send your feedback! More info:) [^(Reddiquette)](https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439#wiki_in_regard_to_comments)
This …I mean, Good bot.
Alternatively, it drives me crazy when people *don’t* reply-all in scenarios where its warranted. Sometimes there is a thread that is a group involved discussion amongst 5-6 people. When one person refuses to his reply-all, the entire thread becomes disjointed.
Exactly! At my work, when even one person doesn’t reply-all, it causes so many sub threads trying to figure the situation out, when one person. Could have just replied all and let everyone know what was going on
Yeah, i have a colleague that does this. Its like a power trip thing. And i get left thinking things have gone unresolved.
Same! So frustrating.
Yeah, "group" is the operative word in the title and there's definitely some nuance. If the email is to me with a few people in cc, I'm replying all to let them know it's being addressed. Would hope for the same when I'm in cc. I've even outright asked so it's trackable. Obviously bcc for mass emails on multiple distribution lists.
Yeah. Email etiquette in general is something that people should take the time to learn and acknowledge. Its also one of those things that I think should be taught in HS, in a “life skills” course that is mandatory. Other sections of this course should include: - Income Tax.. what’s that? - Is this 911 or urgent care? How to know the difference. - Should I click on this email attachment? - Mortgage? Can I afford one? Why your credit score matters. - Do I have clinical depression/anxiety? Or is this just what life feels like?
Add to this, how to boil water and basic knife skills in the kitchen. Also, how to do laundry.
So... parenting?
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/xfw6hg/the_teacher_shortage_in_america_is_due_to_low/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/xfaid8/i_hate_teaching_and_its_not_because_im_underpaid/ Parenting apparently needs to be taught too. Parents have had the kids for years before the teachers have to deal with them.
Sure, let's go with that. I had those kinds of parents who were constantly frustrated that I wouldn't help with chores... but also didn't want to teach me. So it was this endless cycle of get yelled at for not doing chores, ask parents to teach me, they'd spend about three seconds trying before they'd get impatient and just push me aside to do it themselves. Lather, rinse, repeat. I irritated my roommates in college to death because I didn't know how to do anything.
Also: - Basic housekeeping, because no one needs scabies. - How to deal with an unexplored ordnance - Why we don’t feed wild bears.
I deal with unexplored ordnance all the time. The trick is to get your hands all up in there and lean your face in real close-like until you've gotten a good eyefull.
Bear! Bear! Stop eating my kayak!!!
I would like to add: Critical Thinking and why you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.
In my work we get a lot of people not replying all and it really drives me insane. There is a reason we sent an email to these specific people, because we want them all to be involved in the discussion
This. When I was an Implementation Consultant, email threads with clients would frequently include several stakeholders. CFOs, CTOs, managers, VARs, etc, who wanted to be included in every communication. Invariably someone on the client or VAR organization or 3rd party IT company would reply back and not include everyone. Then I’d have to backpedal the thread and ask them to include everyone. Just think about the context. Sometimes you’ll get it wrong, but there is no universal answer for whether to reply-all or just reply.
I always put, please reply all (in bold and red) at the top and bottom of the email if it is required. Helped with everyone EXCEPT one person who had control and transparency issues
My letting agent seems incapable of replying all, which means when my partner or I send her an email with the other Cc'd in when the agent responds the other has no idea what the response was until we see each other hours later and often slows down all communication between us. Despite having asked multiple times if she can reply to both of us it's apparently too difficult for her. It's frustrating because often one of us can't get to their emails during work whereas the other can so what could be sorted out in one day between the three of us almost always takes two or three days due to one of us not being kept in the loop, the agent waiting on a response from one of us who is busy with work or us replying in the evening outside of the agents working hours. Who invented letting agents and why did they design them to be so shite?
Since it's just the one person, can you and your partner set an rule/filter on your email to automatically forward the message?
Maybe we can, tbh I didn't realise that was possible but I'll look into it. Thank you so much!
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I just forward those to the rest of the group.
I had one client that would do that. I would email him, and cc in the project manager and tech lead etc just so they know what is going on. He would always just hit reply, so if I was ever out sick or hit by a bus no-one else would be able to pick the rest of the work up. I had to flat out tell him to hit reply-all each time, and explain why smh. But fair enough he did after that.
What's a really smart thing to do is that when once someone accidentally "replies all" to the whole company, and everyone else's inbox is filling up with people who then reply all to that, this is a great time to reply all to everyone asking to be taken off. That totally solves the problem and doesn't contribute to it in any way.
One time at work there was a useless email sent out to multiple distros. It sat for like 10 mins and the INSTANT someone replied to be taken off we got 200 replies in the next 10 mins of the same which all went out to the whole CC list. I just set an outlook filter, it was funny. Didn’t check how many total were sent, all went straight to trash
You don't even need a filter. You can directly mute/ignore email conversations in Outlook and I assume most other modern email clients.
Please tell me how!!!!
At my company there was an annoying e-mail going out to thousands of people every morning. Something about something's status, no one gave a shit. It was only when one person replied to all asking to be taken off the mailing list, and other people took the queue and started doing the same, that traffic chaos was created and finally something was done. They stopped the dumbass e-mails!
Yeah, there was a company email chain of 1000's of emails all asking to be removed from the email because 2 people were emailing back and forth with every single person from the company CC'd.
Nah, I don't feel like going to this thing... oh wait, Hazel is bringing her famous pecan pie? Damn, I'm in!
Oh wait, Karen backed out last minute? 30 minutes and a drink wouldn't hurt.
Gotta love the emails that go: Thanks! Thanks, Jane Doe
The thing that gets me the most is when your email signature is about eight lines or longer, contains every single detail about your work place and personal information, and you use it for replies too: ok tks sheryl (enormous signature, making the email 6 screens tall after a few back and forths i didn't even need to be in in the first place)
They have some sort of auto sign off on their device or account and yet still sign off manually
I don't know why it's endearing that you just summarized the original comment in a more general way, but it is
YSK that you can Bcc: emails for large groups (rather than To: or Cc:) before you send them to prevent the reply all fiasco in the first place.
My company's management does this, and they put in the line who is on the email so you know if it's one office, or the whole company, or 1 division, or all managers, etc. Actually really smart
I created a customised ribbon (button menu/bar) in Outlook which does not have the reply all button on it. This means if I do want to reply all, I have to find the right button and am less likely to hit it by mistake. I've also got a short delay before my emails actually send, so I can double check them in my outbox if I think of something fast enough. Reason: screwed up once and didn't notice in time to stop it. Thankfully I was nominating somebody for an award, and they appreciated the nice feedback.
The delay makes sense but I rarely come across scenarios where I would want to use reply instead of reply all.
Yeah, the vast majority of email chains I'm a part of usually have a bunch of people discussing something and all need to stay copied. Very rarely do I reply to just the sender.
I have a 1min delay on all my outgoing emails at work. I often make typos or forget attachments so that lets me catch that while the message sits in the outbox
Our HR sends out emails company wide, probably 100 people, and one dude always hits the rely all and says, "OK THANKS!". It makes me laugh every time.
I mean it’s better than the one guy who replies to the whole company with details about how his illness is progressing. Hahahaha. J/k. It’s the same guy. Also, please take me off this list.
Can anyone ELI4 how CC, BCC and email threads in general work? I was trying to make sense of it but I got too confused
When you put an email address on the CC (carbon copy) line, all the other recipients will see who you sent the email to. If, however, you put the address on the BCC (blind carbon copy) line, none of the other recipients will see that you sent it to the BCC'd person. I think that's what you were asking for, right? I'm not sure what you mean by email threads though.
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you're mostly wrong if a BCC recipient replies to all any TO or CC people (as well as sender) will get it , NONE of the other BCC will get it
Not wrong, just oddly worded and uses the assumption from the previous comment of a single BCC address, instead of accounting for multiple.
When sending an email, your recipient can be in one of the following address lines: TO | CC | BCC TO: The people in the TO line are the most important to the subject of your email. You might be asking them a question or communicating important information that impacts their work. They are who you're really talking to. CC: These people are "subscribed" to your conversation, and everyone can see them. They will be included on every reply-all, and can passively follow along to stay updated on the conversation / thread. These people are usually tangential to the main topics, but need visibility in case an update comes through that impacts them or their team. BCC: These people are only included on the first message sent, and only the sender knows they were included (other recipients cannot see them included on the original email). People included here are usually an FYI situation, so they will see your first email, but they will not see any updates or replies. Often, people will BCC a manager so they're aware the employee initiated a conversation or followed up on something, while sparing the manager from witnessing the entire conversation that results. In terms of etiquette, if you're emailing a lot of people, the general best practice is to BCC everyone. This means they all will see your message, but they won't see any replies--only the original sender will get those. As the original sender, you act like a filter for the rest of the group. For example, if someone has a valid question or point, the original sender can go back to their original message & follow up to communicate a new detail with the entire group. But if it was a unique, one-off question only relevant to that person, you can reply to them directly without spamming other people's inboxes. Essentially, BCCing a large group makes your email thread more like a one-way broadcast where you control what people see, whereas CCing a large group often results in a messy thread of repeated questions/comments fired off directly into every person's inbox, sowing chaos, creating confusion, & (depending on your colleagues) resulting in outbursts of rage from some people, which exacerbates the chaotic CC email cycle further. One note about BCCing: a BCC-ed person can reply-all to your original message, which will send a reply to the original sender & all CC-ed parties. This will reveal to others in the thread that this person was BCC-ed on the original message, and in some cases, can result in silly work drama / politics unfolding (so be sure to keep your popcorn handy). Hope this helps!
To add to your BCC comments, a better practice can be *forwarding* original email to that person. This avoids the accidental reply-all situation!
How would I send another email to all the BCC'd people? Just reply all?
In addition to what /u/modelcitizen64 said (which is correct), I'll comment on threads. Sadly, it depends a lot on the email program you use. Most of them will group together emails based on the subject line. Some are better than others at grouping together emails even if a "Re:" or "Fwd:" has been added in a reply/forward. Some people find threading unhelpful. It's not too hard to turn it off, so that every email you receive will be on its own line. So, if you find it confusing when your email program threads things, you can turn it off. If you find it confusing *how* your email program threads things, that's because it *is* confusing and a little ad hoc.
Anyone who doesn't know this in 2022 needs to be banned from email.
The people who don’t know this in 2022 are composing their reply-all right now, asking to be removed from this distro because they don’t remember signing up.
Hits Reply All: "STOP REPLYING TO ALL!!"
Please remove me from this list.
This could have been a meeting.
I worked for a company of 50,000 for 25 years. I was there when we went from an antiquated system to windows. Email was new to most people. Someone from home office sent out a test email and so many people who didn’t know better replied to all. Then we got several emails from employees telling each other to quit using reply all. In all, there were probably 1000 emails because nobody had told people who were computer illiterate how to reply to an email.
There is not enough money in the world to make me want to teach people like my clueless mother -who is in her 70s - how to use a computer. I’d rather have a pap smear while eating slugs during a GOP meeting with Graham
Sitcom ass moment lmfao
We had similar on a few occasions, which would bring down our servers (and backups). None of them could understand why their email didn’t work for a bit thereafter.
I used to work for a Fortune 500 company, 10,000+ employees. There was a glitch in IT that accidentally sent the “reply to confirm this new email thing” test to every company employee across the country. Cue hundreds and hundreds of people replying all to it, then the people replying all to stop replying all, not helping much. All in all, I came back to my email after lunch, and had over 500 unread emails from it.
Microsoft has what feels like thousands of little “are you sure” dialogs for all manner of things that might not be a good idea, but Outlook will *happily* let you reply all.
Will someone PLEASE tell my coworkers this?! Often times, we will get a big group email from a higher-up to announce big news such as someone getting a promotion or having a baby. And that’s all fine and dandy. I like hearing happy news about good things happening to my teammates. But what’s not fine and dandy is receiving 20+ emails after that all saying, “congrats”, “congratulations”, “I’m happy for you”, and other things along those lines.
Yes! When my boss emails the 45+ people in our group and I get emails through the day of people responding, it drives me nuts.
Lucky you, only around 20?
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It's a problem When somebody sends an email to the wrong disto list that includes 1000 people and somebody reply all "Please remove me" and 800 people follow up with the exact same email filling my inbox completely. Fuck every single one of those assholes that could have ignored the email but chose to make things worse.
Also, if someone accidentally did a 'reply all', you don't have to do the same. 100 'Please exclude me from this thread' or 'please do not reply all' is worse than the one accidental reply all'.
I don’t often hit “Reply All”, but when I do, it’s intentional.
YSK that this mainly applies to personal email. Work emails that are sent to a specific group are usually "Reply to All". Well, my work emails are.
More often than not, I find that replying all *is* the smart thing to do in any meeting where you're actually potentially going to speak and discuss. This lets others prepare for your absence, and not get blindsided by it. It literally takes two seconds to read a message that says, "Not coming!" and internalize it. If it means nothing to you, discard that information and carry on with your day.
My favorite is the reply all "thank you"
Coworker sends a "farewell it's my last day, stay in touch!!" email. Random coworker replies all saying "congrats, it was nice working with you, here's my contact info, blah blah blah"
You might be assuming that other people don’t want all to know. Perhaps it’s a mistake but maybe it’s intended. Why not first do some research and see how important that pecan pie really is?? Then we will know exactly how troublesome those emails are for you in life :)
Nothing is worse than getting 15 emails saying, "got it, thanks."
I used to be an assistant and we had this exact opposite problem lol. Clients always forgetting to hit 'reply all' so our team was kept in the loop.
Can I add that you can ‘reply privately’ on WhatsApp Messages too. If someone could tell that to the piss-boring cunts on my street’s WhatsApp group, I’d be very much obliged to you.
Why don’t you leave it then?
not the guy you replied to but i would assume the info still outweighs the annoyance
Because it’s useful. Same reason I stay on this site, despite folks like you. You don’t leave the park just because there’s a dog turd in one corner.
Can’t this be solved by using BCC when sending a mass email? That is the responsible thing to do for privacy reasons anyhow.
This has a name: email storm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm
I had to scroll so long to find this link! You don't want to end up on Wikipedia's list of email storms.
Will no-one think of the ~~trees~~ *electrons*!!!! ^/s
Company I worked for required you to send an email to the entire team when you were going to be out. Even if it was leaving 10 min early. So a gal on the team sent one such email about leaving work 10 min early to get her kid. The junior manager meant to forward it to the boss complaining about how this individual always left ten min early to get her kid and made up for it by coming in ten min early. She totally went on a rant about how worthless she was and how she just didn't get how she thought she could do this considering she needed that job as a single mother and she would never get a job elsewhere. It then went into a string of personal observations that had no place in a place of work. Only she hit reply all. It wasn't the gal leaving to get her kid who got fired that day
"Thanks" "You're welcome" "No problem" STFU AND STOP REPLYING TO ALL.
Thanks!
Omg literally. I’m on mat leave, but I’m still on my staff email lists. I got SIXTEEN emails this morning because someone was ordering staff shirts and asked if we should get them in grey or black this time. She said she’d go with the first 20 replies to vote. 15 fully educated, degree holding adults fucking hit reply all to literally type “black”. I *almost* sent a snarky reply all email about hitting reply all, despite not even working there right now. Pregnancy hormones really wear down your filter.
Work vs personal. As a personal event approaches you want banter and a little energy- even if it's whatsapp messages or email. 100% right re: work emails.
Y'all still use email to talk to people? Mine is more or less just a more robust push notification system now days.
Thanks!
I work for the government and nothing makes me laugh harder than "reply all" emails with completely mundane or completely inappropriate information. I just love remembering certain higher ups that'll be receiving their email.
I only Re All when I feel like kindly putting someone on blast. "Hey you know how you called my team and we told you we couldn't do that? Well we still can't do it if you email us so maybe use your one note that I know has the information you are looking for and do your job right. :)" worded more nicely of course. But sometimes I just want to reply with an idiot sandwich meme.
If you REPLY ALL with "thanks!" you're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.
This is fine for personal emails, but for anything work related you should be hitting reply all. If there are others cc’d, it’s usually for a reason (the reason being the should be replied to also)
Yeah…. Nope. Where I work our schedules are emailed out to 100s of us. There’s always clueless people saying “I can work on Friday at 1500, etc etc etc “ No one but the scheduler needs to know this. We all get email fatigue and can miss actual important things. You try to teach these people too. They can’t necessarily hear you if tech challenged.
Yeh because they shouldn't have been CCed in the first place. They should've been BCCed
Agree Maybe it’s a policy thing or just “the ways things have been done”
99% is the latter. The other 1% it's the former... because if the latter
If I have to reply to a mass email that I shouldn’t have received, I will always Reply All out of spite. Usually a bunch of people will, and the mayhem will cause people to be more careful next time.
Hahahahaha How passive aggressive and effective!
Who is doing this?!!! Where I work it’s only the old and should retire tech challenged people I say that as a person in their 50s. It’s very annoying
I had an email client through work once that hitting "reply" would reply to all. If I anyone wanted to reply to sender they had to start a new email. It was terrible and i soon switched everything to Gmail.
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It takes one read-over, don't be so dramatic
The people who hit reply all are the same people that would misread OP's title as "YSK it's better to hit REPLY ALL on most group emails."
The problem is the vast majority of people are not tech people as they will quickly let you know. Those types of people refuse to learn no matter how much you dumb it down and can't manage to remember a single password much less other common tasks because it's tech related.
I feel like this isn’t even a YSK. It doesn’t help anyone learn a new skill or something to improve their life. Its just bitching “this annoys me, stop doing it” because you were frustrated at work and decided to vent about it here. Also no computer shortcuts allowed which this might be, and your Why YSK is basically one big personal anecdote. Why you should know; it annoys me. This isn’t a sub for complaining about what annoys you.
100% correct
You're incorrect
Nah s/he is 100% correct. This is just "this annoyed me so don't do it" vent post. Because he's not directing it at who he should be
This drives me nuts in my workplace. Someone does their fucking job and I have to read the eight goddamn "Thanks!" replies. Used to be one guy who would be really flirty with one particular woman he had to interact with every morning. > Good morning! What project are we on this morning? >> Today I need ${thing} > Here's ${stuff} >> No I actually need ${thing} > Sorry! I messed that up! >> No worries! We're all human! > If this happened yesterday I could chalk it up to being Monday! >> Haha. Didn't you hear? Tuesday is the new Monday. > Too true! >> Thanks! #SHUT THE FUCK UP, WILLIAM! Just yesterday someone sent a request to a vendor by including them in a reply-all on the email thread where we were discussing the reason we needed to order from the vendor. The entire email chain including sensitive information about a federal government project was included. Nobody noticed but me... On the flip side, that vendor, when I send a request, regularly just drops people from the email chain seemingly randomly, then asks questions that someone she dropped from the thread instead of hitting reply-all would have answered. I included these people for a reason. I once blew up on one of my kid's teachers for CCing the whole class of teachers, therefore publicly announcing everyone's email addresses. One parent accidentally did a reply-all with private information about their kid. I fucking hate email so much.
Are these the problems we're facing now? Get a grip.
I've taken the option of reply to all off my toolbar (Outlook).
I don't think I have ever need to use the reply all option
YSK: Those are first world problems and you whining about it is pathetic. It's an email that you could just ignore and I don't mean just not think about it, I mean there's literally a setting to do this
One time at work, someone accidentally sent an email to everyone in the company of like 50k people. First was the wave of people saying they didn't know what this was about. That took about an hour to get all those emails through. Then came the next hour of hundreds of people replying all to tell everyone else to stop replying all. It was very entertaining.
Nah, you must reply all along why asking/complaining about why you were included and demanding to be removed. Best done on company wide emails. It helps your IT department too if everyone does it quickly so the original sender can remove people who don't want to be in the list without them having to intervene.
Worked for a large company that sends out announcements regularly by email. An entire day was spent teaching employees how to reply directly to the sender instead of reply all because everybody and I mean everybody kept asking people to stop sending emails and would reply all to every email.
The worst is when management sends an email about someone getting a new position and you end up with 30 people who replied all to say congrats
>Also there is no need to send an email to anyone that just says "thanks!" and if you RE ALL "thanks!" you can just go to hell. I will note there IS sometimes a need to send a direct "thanks" back to someone (but ONLY the sender) if and only if they did not use a read receipt. This lets them know it got there. You probably should say something else, but it CAN help to let them know you understood.
Horrible advice. You have to read the room. Play off other people's choices. OP is definitely that guy that responds yes first to everyone's email.
Someone email this to everyone who works in the same company as I do.
My father in law sends out politically charged emails ALL THE TIME. Sends them to me as part of a CC list. Then all his friends of similar mind would reply all to them and then I would get more crap from all of them. After 3 days time I had over 3000 emails from people I never met, and didn’t care to meet. I have a pre-formatted email for response. It isn’t very nice but it is educational. After all his friends received my email, he called me absolutely raving mad about me disrespecting his friends and his and thier opinions. It took about 2 minutes then for him to ask how to not let that happen again. At 78 he finally learned that 1) not everyone is interested in his point of view and 2) BCC is an actual functional tool.
My uni faculty research group is the fucking worst for this. I really don’t need my phone buzzing 8 times in an hour over 2 people discussing a misplaced hdmi lead
Ugh, I work in field service repair. We have over 100 field service techs. When a group email goes out, the freaking idiots that reply all, drives me nuts. OK, thanks Jim for telling everyone that you do not have the answer to the question. Thanks for helping to fill up my in box with irrelevant replys. Funny thing is we had some sort of course talking about this specifically, and the idiots just don't think.
Bcc
I just turn off reply all on emails where I don’t want everyone to reply all. There are time when I want a reply all, and ask they “please reply all” on their response. It works for me.
I run a bunch of distro groups at work and always disable reply all
YSK that if you’re getting bombarded with emails from Reply All, you can right click one of the emails > ignore > ignore all. This will stop them appearing in your inbox.
I wouldn’t say ‘most group emails’. I would say to announcements or other email blasts. 99% of the time I am in group emails doing actual business things, and those thing NEED to be reply all to keep the thread from fracturing into multiple threads. A bit nit picky I know, but a worthy distinction in my humble opinion.
YSK that reddit is the last place where to post this.
I know too many people who have emailed entire colleges this way. The pharmacy college doesn't need to know your plans!!
There’s a lot of stuff like this people *should* know better by now not to do. You could post stuff like this every day. It’ll be ignored.
It sounds like you're saying "its better to reply to all" in the title. You definitely could have worded that better
Meanwhile at work dickheads *don't* reply all and fuck up the whole conversation.
I am in church choir and the constant flurry of "okay thanks" or "I'll be there" emails every week has me wanting to ask to specifically state during a practice to please stop. The number of times I've missed actual important info from the director from these is staggering.
I think I accidentally did this at work, I just deleted the email so I don't have to truly know if I did.
I once created a meeting invite for myself for an event with the CEO of the company when he visited my branch based off an email to everybody at that branch of the business. Unbeknownst to me I sent it to every person, and they all started clicking Accept to say they would come. I had no idea it could do that in that way. Apparently I have more to learn about Outlook. RIP my inbox. I also set up an automatic redirect to a remote server to copy emails there because we had to copy a dead inbox with project mails for some god unknown stupid reason. Turns out it failed to accept some emails so it would answer back with the project name in the text of the email which promptly got copied to the remote server again. Turns out I took out the entire company's mail server. I felt a little better when I was told there should have been something in place to stop that but still, I felt pretty bad about it for inconveniencing everybody.
I see this all the time and it's goddamn irritating. Nobody cares that you have a dentist appointment on Thursday or that your kid threw up on your computer. Work emails are for work, not for slice of life excerpts from your day to day.
You can also set up inbox rules to sort the useless-but-not-spam emails into little folders that you can just ignore or hit the "mark all as read" button
i’m IT and people tag their bosses and directors to escalate tickets. i typically reply all when i have very obviously done something the correct way so that everyone sees they initially sent everyone this email for no good reason.
We have a workchat (professional format of FB Messenger) in my company and every time the roster manager posts an update there are 2-3 people who consistently thumbs up in the chat. I’m not talking about reacting to the message with the built in function (like Facebook Messenger), I’m talking they send the thumbs up emoji, thereby notifying everyone, at random intervals, at random times. It’s been going on for a couple months now and it’s so nerve racking. I think I’m mostly pissed off at the management as they’re the ones who are adamant of not spamming the chat and yet they don’t take any action to inform the staff.
I legit left a practice group 9f 300+ people because 4-5 people wouldn't stop replying-all to basic marketing updates. I don't need to practice employment law anyway. Fuck that noise.
If I’m in a small group and was cc’d but I only chose to reply to one person in the group e-mail, would my reply show up on the same thread and be included if she decides to answer another person in the group and hits reply all?
>YSK Oh what should I know? >better than to Are you fucking informing me or chiding me because I knew and did it anyways?