The dangers of Reply All

[alabamagal]

This is from a big case in Atlanta.  One of the main defendants in the school cheating scandal is sick with cancer.  In response to a message about a delay, one of the ADA made a snarky comment, but apparently hit Reply All instead of just the person who it was supposed to go to.


www.ajc.com/news/news/local-education/fulton-county-ada-pulled-off-aps-cheating-case/ngc6p/

When I worked for a big company, a lot of people would reply all with stupid things, but never this bad.

[Deleted]

I think there should be an "Are you sure?" warning box that pops up when you hit reply all.

I sent out an out of office email to all the departments and management groups once before leaving on vacation and one of my coworker friends accidentally replied all "YOU SUCK!" 

[movingforward]

I had a friend who accidentally sent a message to the wrong person at work.  The person she sent it to was the person she was talking about in the email - LOL.  It said something to the effect of "Scott sure is in a crappy mood today.  Who peed in his cornflakes."  The email was supposed to go to a Stephanie but as soon as she typed in the s the names in her contact list popped up and she accidentally hit Scott instead of Stephanie. 

[bean29]

I have a SIL that likes to send group texts.  Group texts are problematic in that you hit reply and think you are replying to the sender and it goes to everyone they originally sent the text to.  I was reading My SIL's latest group  text when I got a text from my DD.  DD's message scrolled above the text I was in.  I typed in a reply to DD asking her to pick up the dog...and it accidently replied to my SIL's group of friends.  So I guess I myself am just as guilty.

I hate group texts and I don't reply to them anymore.  I did not block them on my phone b/c we found them useful when my Dad was in the hospital and we wanted to update several family members with the same info.  My SIL uses them to send every family and friend a Merry Christmas, Happy Easter, Happy Mother's Day, Happy Fathers Day send my Kid birthday wishes message etc etc.

My old work had group e-mails and we did have a way to call them back if they were unopened.    It was a large company with a decent IT department so I think we probably had a warning message on a group text. 

[movingforward]

I hate group texts too.  I understand the reasoning behind it in that you can get the word out quickly to a bunch of people but they can be extremely annoying.  One of our board members sent out a group text when her baby was born.  Nice to know but then your stupid phone is dinging every few minutes from people you have never even met before congratulating her.  Then some people don't even see the text for a few hours so this goes on forever. 

[NancysSummerSip]

I was the target of a mis-sent group email one time. Someone I worked with had a rather strong dislike of Jewish people, and chose to use her computer to vent her anti-Semitic ravings. I had no idea until I accidentally received one of her emails, that I had become one of her targets. Neither my maiden nor my married names sound Jewish, so someone must have told her. She had been sending group emails, and hit "send" one time with my name in the group.

[Deleted]

Oh, I have another one.  My son's Dad is an adult leader in scouts and prior to that was a den leader in cub scouts.  One kid's Dad apparently had a strong dislike for him and sent an email to all the parents of the kids in the den, ranting and raving about him and making all kinds of outrageous accusations.  Well, I don't think he realized that he included his ex-wife or maybe thought that I'd be happy to jump on the bandwagon, but he found out pretty quick I was not going to do that.

[Baby Fawkes]

Most of the email clients/servers that I've used all have a built-in send delay that I always set to a minute (Outlook, gmail etc). When you hit send it gets held in your outbox for the period of time you set before actually getting released. Gives you the last chance after you've accidentally replied-all or just added the wrong person due to auto-complete or something.

I've never had to stop something that would have been problematic if it was sent, but I've caught a instances of forgetting to attach something to the email that I said I was - I like that most email clients also pop up a warning if you refer to an attachment in the text but there are not attachments

[Deleted]

At a previous company they would send out informational emails to all the employees and one happened to be one from the credit union where you were allowed to be a member if you work for the company. It had something in there about refinancing your car loan or something and an employee replied all to the entire company questioning what kind of kickbacks management got from these loans. That employee was gone the next month.

[CarolinaKat]

We had a 'reply all' fiasco. Someone from one of the offices in Finland accidently sent a e-mail to the entire company (not site, not mfg division, not regional division, but EVERYONE) that thing ended up with almost 150 'reply all reponses in many different languages. It also tied up the e-mail server all morning.

At one point people started mocking things. THAT was funny!

[billisonboard]

I got an all employees email telling us about all the wonderful snacks we didn't want to miss which were on the break room table. Only problem was I work at a different site 7 hours away from the table. 

[hoops902]

We get this all the time.  There is one group who refuses to change their mailing list name which is very similar to the national mailing list (at least it isn't the worldwide group).  So they send an email meant for about 200 people to a group of about 10,000.  Then for the next 3 hours it's "reply all" with:

"Please take me off this mailing list"
"What is this?"
"Please stop replying to all"
"Take me off this list"
"Take me off this list"
"Take me off too"
"Stop using reply all!"
"Stop using reply all!"
"Do NOT use reply all!"
"Managers please review the use of reply all with your employees"
"Please take me off this mailing list"
"Stop using reply all!"

I came back to over 200 of these emails when I was out of the office when it happened once.

[Sam_2.0]

Our company disabled the reply all option for large groups. Only a small handful of people have the rights to send emails to our mass distribution groups. The rest of us can't, and if we try to reply all to mass emails it won't allow them to be sent. I guess someone could still go in and add the whole address book manually, but so far that's not happened.

[Deleted]

Jul 11, 2014 10:31:37 GMT -5 movingforward said:

I hate group texts too.  I understand the reasoning behind it in that you can get the word out quickly to a bunch of people but they can be extremely annoying.  One of our board members sent out a group text when her baby was born.  Nice to know but then your stupid phone is dinging every few minutes from people you have never even met before congratulating her.  Then some people don't even see the text for a few hours so this goes on forever. 

I accidentally replied to everyone in a group text and I learned my lesson to make SURE that never happens again. It was a "Happy Mother's Day" message from a co-worker. I said "Thank you". One of the numbers in the group text started texting me back to back, asking "who is this", and calling me repeatedly. I finally texted back "it was a mistake, I apologize". They kept calling me! I finally answered, I was already irritated and she immediately said something crazy and I let loose. It turned out to be my co-workers 20something daughter and she said she was going to tell her Daddy on me. Lol, make sure you tell him how stupid you are too. The next time I saw him at work, I asked him if his daughter told him I'd cursed her out. She hadn't, and he thought it was funny when I told him what happened.

I always make sure I edit recipients before I respond to a group text.

[Mardi Gras Audrey]

Jul 11, 2014 15:31:03 GMT -5 billisonboard said:

I got an all employees email telling us about all the wonderful snacks we didn't want to miss which were on the break room table. Only problem was I work at a different site 7 hours away from the table. 

Did you ever make it to the table?  I hope they saved you some snacks...

[midjd]

Jul 11, 2014 16:41:00 GMT -5 Sam_2.0 said:

Our company disabled the reply all option for large groups. Only a small handful of people have the rights to send emails to our mass distribution groups. The rest of us can't, and if we try to reply all to mass emails it won't allow them to be sent. I guess someone could still go in and add the whole address book manually, but so far that's not happened.

Mine did too. Now we have to get permission from the Director to send out statewide emails.

Hoops, that happens all the time on the ABA listserv! It is maddening. I wish email accounts had an option like Facebook has where you could remove yourself from the message and stop getting replies.

[Deleted]

We have an area of the company that deals with military contracts.  They have a walled off email system for this purpose along with their corporate email.  We had to install a macro on their corporate mail client that asks them every time if they are using the right email system when they go to send a message.  Of course that isn't good enough, so we have measures on email servers to look for and stop this email before it is delivered (Data Loss Prevention in techy terms).

People make mistakes.  The reply-all mistake is common.

[Mardi Gras Audrey]

Jul 11, 2014 16:38:19 GMT -5 hoops902 said:

We get this all the time.  There is one group who refuses to change their mailing list name which is very similar to the national mailing list (at least it isn't the worldwide group).  So they send an email meant for about 200 people to a group of about 10,000.  Then for the next 3 hours it's "reply all" with:

"Please take me off this mailing list"
"What is this?"
"Please stop replying to all"
"Take me off this list"
"Take me off this list"
"Take me off too"
"Stop using reply all!"
"Stop using reply all!"
"Do NOT use reply all!"
"Managers please review the use of reply all with your employees"
"Please take me off this mailing list"
"Stop using reply all!"

I came back to over 200 of these emails when I was out of the office when it happened once.

We used to have stuff like this happen when I was in the military.  What irritated me was the people who kept replying all "Take me off the list" or "stop replying to all".  Hey, dumba$$, by replying yourself, you are part of the problem.  Just stop and delete the email.  How long does it take to delete an email, especially if they all have the same subject line?

We also had people bitch about being off the group when they got something that didn't pertain to them (Some people weren't at our site and they were in the group because they were in the group, just not physically there).  If you sent out something that pertained to 90% of the group, some in the 10% would email back "don't send me this".... Umm, the email pertains to 90% of the people.  If not you, just delete it (these were single informational emails).  It takes more time to reply and complain that you got it than to just delete it.