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The advice at the end is pretty important - if you want the thread to die, just ignore it. All told people mostly followed this, and if only 120 replies were se
by smcl 10y ago
The advice at the end is pretty important - if you want the thread to die, just ignore it. All told people mostly followed this, and if only 120 replies were sent in an organisation as huge as the NHS then that's pretty incredible. In our company's "social" list the silly reply-all chains have a very predictable pattern, coming in a series of waves:
1. original sensible email like "hey guys, I have some honey/walnuts/fruit/spirits from my hometown if anyone wants to try/buy"
2. sensible replies start rolling in, but which were accidentally sent to all
3. some jokers/trolls send memes in response (also reply all)
4. the whining begins, people reply-all asking everyone to stop spamming them
5. the memers reply (sometimes with more memes) that it is the optional "social" list that's for this sort of nonserious/fun stuff.
6. some helpful problem-solvers weigh in, sending reply-all instructions (often including MS Paint'd diagrams) on how to unsubscribe from the list or apply an outlook filter
7. finally the "can everyone just stop replying to this though?" emails start, also reply-all (and apparently oblivious to the contradiction/irony of their own reply-all) and everyone participating starts to realise it should be ignored...
Once you recognise the pattern it becomes pretty enjoyable identifying which stage of this month's "Emailgate" you're currently at - the whole thing can around to 45-60 mins to play out.
- cgvgffyv 10y agoIf anyone working on Office 365 OWA is about, please make the Ignore button front and center if the To is a mailing list. One can right click and then Ignore the thread, but presumably nobody is aware of this or we wouldn't be having this conversation.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- randlet 10y agoIn my experience watching lay people use computers, they almost never consider right clicking.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoYou assume there is anyone working on Office 365 OWA who is doing anything but the mandatory re-skinning whenever MSFT rebrands their Office/cloud offerings yet again. But evidence points to the contrary; to wit, they have yet to implement S/MIME signed email in anything but an incredibly useless way: the email is not displayed, but a link says "This is not supported in the current view, please click here", and when you click it a popup (Yes! A real 1997 era popup! That your browser will complain about and induces even more clicks! OWA loves them!) appears that displays the actual message but fails to verify the signature.
- branchless 10y agoOne of my favourite days at work in a large bank was when someone sent a boring email to the wrong list. It was a big list. A few people replied all saying "can you remove me from this list please". Then more people replied saying "can you please stop replying all on this thread". Then people said "can you remove me from this list please" again replying all. The mail servers slowed to a crawl. We had thousands of emails. It began at 9am GMT. Eventually after about 3 or so hours everything calmed down and we could send mail again, albeit with a large delay. Around 12:30 the US workers began coming in, openend outlook and saw all the emails. And instead of scrolling down they sent an email, reply all "could you remove me from this list". Again people replied "stop replying all" on reply all. We were up and running again! Mail was down for the rest of the day. The next day some people who were off the day before came in and there was again a brief storm, but sadly this one only lasted around 30 minutes. One of the biggest banks. Lasted a whole day. We christened it "moron storm".
- Symbiote 10y agoShouldn't these be straightforward to block, by matching on the References header? That contains the message id of previous messages.
- branchless 10y agoThese are people who in general not tech workers. Also at some points one could not open the email client nor scroll to the latest messages.
- brazzledazzle 10y agoSince these are so trivial to halt and blow away everything in the queue from the thread I can only imagine the sysadmins in charge of these mail systems are letting it continue for comedic effect. That or they have to jump through weeks of change control hoops so letting it play out is faster.
- branchless 10y agoNo I assume that given the input rate and perhaps due to distributed, non-responsive servers or perhaps sheer incompetence they couldn't halt it.
- TranceMan 10y agoCould it be only 120 people got to send a reply as others could not access the system once the replies started coming in, 120 x 1.2M is a big number.
- viraptor 10y ago120 x 1.2M + read receipts. They had it turned on.
- jordache 10y ago8.Someone high up the food chain steps in with a strongly worded email to stop replying. A brief moment of calm ensues 9.Some smart jack replies all - "I'll try to do that"
- JimboOmega 10y agoThat's ignoring the stage of "please take me off this list" - which, in my opinion, makes it a lot worse since then people suddenly feel like they CAN do something, namely, ask to be taken off the list. This is especially compounded when it's a list that never has anything you want on it anyway - say it's some sort of distro that is usually used for the corporate newsletter. Hilarious to watch I must say.
- ptaipale 10y agoA good trolling in this respect used to be a single-word reply "unsubscribe". However, it might not work any more, as people are no longer familiar with Majordomo mailing lists.
- branchless 10y agoNo. The correct thing to do here is to send a mail reply all asking how you can get on the list.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoThe best one I've been in was a scientific conference mailing list where the first email sent out instructed users to reply with "Unsubscribe" if they wanted off the list, but the reply-to address was set to the post-to-list address. So ordinary replies were converted into reply-to-all. Hilarity ensued.