7 ms·

Microsoft now blocks reply-all email storms to end our inbox nightmares

55 points by ajay-d 6y ago

rootsofallevil 6y ago
I've seen a few of these and, as somebody without anything to do with the running of the email servers, I can say that they have been quite good fun to watch. The right thing to do, of course, is email the whole group asking them to stop emailing the whole group ....
- thegagne 6y ago
  The best thing to do is reply all and tell them to opt out by clicking here <insert affiliate link OPT OUT: Rethink success. Reinvent rich. Realize the life you want. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732287244/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_D2bUEb1V342QV> https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732287244/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_D2...
- oever 6y ago
  Or you can reply to all to ask everyone to respect your wish to be removed from any further replies.
- tyingq 6y ago
  That's actually not a terrible idea, provided you BCC: them instead of TO:.
- toast0 6y ago
  > The right thing to do, of course, is email the whole group asking them to stop emailing the whole group .... It's also important to get to the bottom of how and why we were all added to this list, a discussion that is certainly appropriate for this list!
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    If reply all didn’t exists I think the world would be a better place. There are rare occasions it is needed, but in groups of 10+ is it really required? At a minimum an irritating series of “are you sure” dialogues might help.
tyingq 6y ago
"10 reply-all emails to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes" It reads like that's hardcoded. Surprised you can't configure it. A welcome feature nonetheless. Edit: Appears it is hardcoded, at least for now. "We are considering possible future enhancements to improve our reply all storm detection accuracy, add admin customizable thresholds and block duration, as well as producing reply all storm reports and notifications."
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Yeah, it really should be configurable. I personally would want it for any list over 50. It’s rare that such a large list requires everyone to know something new 10 times in less than an hour. And if that many ppl do it would probably benefit from a teams channel discussion not email.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    That would make universities shed staff instantly. The number of massive group emails sent and the daily storms that result keep many employees.
    - vxNsr 6y ago
      Can’t tell if you’re being serious or just aren’t fully explaining
      - lostlogin 6y ago
        Mine was was an unhelpful comment. Universities seem to like sending huge group emails about everything, and there are always many “reply all” responses and it’s awful. The department would do it, as would the school, faculty, facility, campus and head office. And often others from that list that I wasn’t involved in would sent them too. It was a daily train wreck.
nyanpasu64 6y ago
Centralized forums?
prepend 6y ago
“Reply with Teams” I just create a rule after a single reply all saying “please remove me” But I haven’t seen one of these in many years.
garraeth 6y ago
I don't know anything about email software, but would it be difficult to add a popup after hitting the "Send" button that would appear only if there were more than X recipients (w/ a user-configurable minimum and sane default)? Something like: "This email will be sent to 5,000 people. Are you sure you would like to send it?"
- Znafon 6y ago
  This would not solve the issue when the email is sent to a mailing list.
  - mdturnerphys 6y ago
    When the mailing lists are internal Exchange-based lists Outlook can check how many people are on them.
- Analemma_ 6y ago
  IME email storms are most often for one of two reasons: - someone mistakenly sends a mail to List B instead of List A, so everyone on List B goes "Huh? Remove me from this" - someone correctly sends an email to List A, but List A was poorly configured and people were put on it without their knowledge and respond in confusion A "too many recipients" warning wouldn't help with either of these cases.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Outlook does that by default when the email goes to more than a few hundreds people. Don't remember the exact limit. It also works if it's a single destination email that happens to be a distribution list with 500 people.
  - vxNsr 6y ago
    They do it by default for all distribution list sizes, I have a list with 4 ppl in it and it still lets you know how many ppl will be getting your email.
Exmoor 6y ago
This is one of those features that seems so common sense that it's surprising it's taken this long to show up. It reminds me of when Gmail and Outlook started giving you a warning if you said the word "attached" or "attachment" in an email, but didn't attach files. This reminds me of the best email storm I ever saw. Someone at a large company I worked at sent an email to a discussion group that everyone had filtered with rules, but they put a one-letter typo in the domain name. So imagine something like sending it to HugeGroup@enail.com instead of @email.com. The thing was, the company actually owned enail.com to keep competitors from squatting on it, so the email actually went through, but completely broke almost everyone's rules. The results were quite spectacular, and entertaining.
- sjwright 6y ago
  Great story. Ridiculous that MX records were assigned to a defensively held domain name. Just asking for edge cases. Lucky this one didn’t have security consequences.
  - crankylinuxuser 6y ago
    > Ridiculous that MX records were assigned to a defensively held domain name. Just asking for edge cases. Lucky this one didn’t have security consequences. Not really. Think of it from the customer's side. You sent an email to who you were thinking was legitimate. You want it to go to the person/group you sent it to. So, because of that, the admins (and customer facing) want to deliver the message. I do understand the complexity of this problem. I'm sure for large corps that wouldn't be true...
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      The solution here is a bounce message, not completed delivery.
      - crankylinuxuser 6y ago
        But why bounce when you can do what was intended? To me, that seems like the "Technical is the worst kind of correct" answer. And if your smaller org does good customer service, then you liberally accept and help. We on HN like to talk about horror company one of. We never talk much of the ones that do things right (or better).
sjwright 6y ago
Whenever I’ve worked at a company with Exchange/Outlook I always set up my one mail rule I can’t live without: any incoming email that doesn’t have my own email address in the To: or Cc: fields is moved into a different inbox (subfolder). It was rare for any unaddressed stuff to matter to me, and it was certainly never urgent, so usually I gave it a quick scan once a day and mark it read. Almost makes email tolerable.
- pfyra 6y ago
  Yeah, I do almost the same but my rules set different colors on emails where I appear in To or CC. This way I have a quick way of determining the important (To) and perhaps important (CC) from all other emails. I wouldn't want to work with email without these rules.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    Nice. In my case, my direct mail load was very low—typically around 3 to 5 emails per day—and anything I was specifically CCed on was just as important for me to read as anything sent to me personally. Whereas stuff sent to group lists (and other automated mail) was on the order of 10–30 emails per day. Enough to make any "new mail" notifications utterly worthless.
- thunderbong 6y ago
  I've got to try this. Although in Gmail you can set indicators for when emails are too you directly, I think this solution is way better!
freepor 6y ago
I wonder if there is an exception for execs. At a previous employer it was quite common for a big piece of news to be announced by a senior exec and then have the CEO and other execs reply all in a big storm. Definitely more than 5,000 FTE on the list.
- Analemma_ 6y ago
  There often are exceptions for execs for rules like this, which can cause their own sets of problems. I was at Microsoft when Steve Ballmer sent the company-wide email announcing he was going to step down; Reply All was disabled for most people, but some poor VP in MSR, who I guess was high enough up to be an exception, accidentally reply-all'd the whole company with his positive reaction to the announcement. That guy must've had an awkward day.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I find it sometimes interesting to skim through trivial (praise/reaction) and nontrivial (response/correction) reply-all threads to gain a better understanding of the social dynamics, attitudes, etc. across different departments in a company. In other words, while they aren't always useful for immediate work, they sometimes help with metawork.
xxpor 6y ago
There's no faster way for me to know that someone is a person I'd never want to work with than if they participate in a reply all storm. It's 2020. Learn how email works.
- kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
  I participate in every email reply-all storm. Because I'm not a soulless, joyless, curmudgeon who gets upset by receiving emails "oh noes my inboxzero!" And it's funny.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    Well, I should have been more clear. I enjoy the trolling responses, not the ones from people who have been at a company for 5 years and haven't figured out how to unsubscribe themselves from an email list.
- Traster 6y ago
  Sometimes it's fun to pretend you don't know how email works and 'accidentally' completely fuck up your company/university email system for a few hours.
mav3rick 6y ago
Story time - Steve Ballmer sends an email to the entire company about buying Nokia. Some high level exec replies all and says "Told you so ". To which Ballmer also replies all with a smiley. Don't know if they knew they were replying all. Or if they didn't care. Quite bizarre.
bzb3 6y ago
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/me-too/ba-p/610643 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/me... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121015-00/?p=6333 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121015-00/?p=63...

55 points by ajay-d 6y ago

I've seen a few of these and, as somebody without anything to do with the running of the email servers, I can say that they have been quite good fun to watch. The right thing to do, of course, is email the whole group asking them to stop emailing the whole group ....

thegagne 6y ago
The best thing to do is reply all and tell them to opt out by clicking here <insert affiliate link OPT OUT: Rethink success. Reinvent rich. Realize the life you want. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732287244/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_D2bUEb1V342QV> https://www.amazon.com/dp/1732287244/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_D2...
oever 6y ago
Or you can reply to all to ask everyone to respect your wish to be removed from any further replies.
tyingq 6y ago
That's actually not a terrible idea, provided you BCC: them instead of TO:.
toast0 6y ago
> The right thing to do, of course, is email the whole group asking them to stop emailing the whole group .... It's also important to get to the bottom of how and why we were all added to this list, a discussion that is certainly appropriate for this list!
- lostlogin 6y ago
  If reply all didn’t exists I think the world would be a better place. There are rare occasions it is needed, but in groups of 10+ is it really required? At a minimum an irritating series of “are you sure” dialogues might help.

tyingq 6y ago

"10 reply-all emails to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes" It reads like that's hardcoded. Surprised you can't configure it. A welcome feature nonetheless. Edit: Appears it is hardcoded, at least for now. "We are considering possible future enhancements to improve our reply all storm detection accuracy, add admin customizable thresholds and block duration, as well as producing reply all storm reports and notifications."

vxNsr 6y ago
Yeah, it really should be configurable. I personally would want it for any list over 50. It’s rare that such a large list requires everyone to know something new 10 times in less than an hour. And if that many ppl do it would probably benefit from a teams channel discussion not email.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  That would make universities shed staff instantly. The number of massive group emails sent and the daily storms that result keep many employees.
  - vxNsr 6y ago
    Can’t tell if you’re being serious or just aren’t fully explaining
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      Mine was was an unhelpful comment. Universities seem to like sending huge group emails about everything, and there are always many “reply all” responses and it’s awful. The department would do it, as would the school, faculty, facility, campus and head office. And often others from that list that I wasn’t involved in would sent them too. It was a daily train wreck.

nyanpasu64 6y ago

Centralized forums?

prepend 6y ago

“Reply with Teams” I just create a rule after a single reply all saying “please remove me” But I haven’t seen one of these in many years.

garraeth 6y ago

I don't know anything about email software, but would it be difficult to add a popup after hitting the "Send" button that would appear only if there were more than X recipients (w/ a user-configurable minimum and sane default)? Something like: "This email will be sent to 5,000 people. Are you sure you would like to send it?"

Znafon 6y ago
This would not solve the issue when the email is sent to a mailing list.
- mdturnerphys 6y ago
  When the mailing lists are internal Exchange-based lists Outlook can check how many people are on them.
Analemma_ 6y ago
IME email storms are most often for one of two reasons: - someone mistakenly sends a mail to List B instead of List A, so everyone on List B goes "Huh? Remove me from this" - someone correctly sends an email to List A, but List A was poorly configured and people were put on it without their knowledge and respond in confusion A "too many recipients" warning wouldn't help with either of these cases.
user5994461 6y ago
Outlook does that by default when the email goes to more than a few hundreds people. Don't remember the exact limit. It also works if it's a single destination email that happens to be a distribution list with 500 people.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  They do it by default for all distribution list sizes, I have a list with 4 ppl in it and it still lets you know how many ppl will be getting your email.

Exmoor 6y ago

This is one of those features that seems so common sense that it's surprising it's taken this long to show up. It reminds me of when Gmail and Outlook started giving you a warning if you said the word "attached" or "attachment" in an email, but didn't attach files. This reminds me of the best email storm I ever saw. Someone at a large company I worked at sent an email to a discussion group that everyone had filtered with rules, but they put a one-letter typo in the domain name. So imagine something like sending it to HugeGroup@enail.com instead of @email.com. The thing was, the company actually owned enail.com to keep competitors from squatting on it, so the email actually went through, but completely broke almost everyone's rules. The results were quite spectacular, and entertaining.

sjwright 6y ago
Great story. Ridiculous that MX records were assigned to a defensively held domain name. Just asking for edge cases. Lucky this one didn’t have security consequences.
- crankylinuxuser 6y ago
  > Ridiculous that MX records were assigned to a defensively held domain name. Just asking for edge cases. Lucky this one didn’t have security consequences. Not really. Think of it from the customer's side. You sent an email to who you were thinking was legitimate. You want it to go to the person/group you sent it to. So, because of that, the admins (and customer facing) want to deliver the message. I do understand the complexity of this problem. I'm sure for large corps that wouldn't be true...
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    The solution here is a bounce message, not completed delivery.
    - crankylinuxuser 6y ago
      But why bounce when you can do what was intended? To me, that seems like the "Technical is the worst kind of correct" answer. And if your smaller org does good customer service, then you liberally accept and help. We on HN like to talk about horror company one of. We never talk much of the ones that do things right (or better).

sjwright 6y ago

Whenever I’ve worked at a company with Exchange/Outlook I always set up my one mail rule I can’t live without: any incoming email that doesn’t have my own email address in the To: or Cc: fields is moved into a different inbox (subfolder). It was rare for any unaddressed stuff to matter to me, and it was certainly never urgent, so usually I gave it a quick scan once a day and mark it read. Almost makes email tolerable.

pfyra 6y ago
Yeah, I do almost the same but my rules set different colors on emails where I appear in To or CC. This way I have a quick way of determining the important (To) and perhaps important (CC) from all other emails. I wouldn't want to work with email without these rules.
- sjwright 6y ago
  Nice. In my case, my direct mail load was very low—typically around 3 to 5 emails per day—and anything I was specifically CCed on was just as important for me to read as anything sent to me personally. Whereas stuff sent to group lists (and other automated mail) was on the order of 10–30 emails per day. Enough to make any "new mail" notifications utterly worthless.
thunderbong 6y ago
I've got to try this. Although in Gmail you can set indicators for when emails are too you directly, I think this solution is way better!

freepor 6y ago

I wonder if there is an exception for execs. At a previous employer it was quite common for a big piece of news to be announced by a senior exec and then have the CEO and other execs reply all in a big storm. Definitely more than 5,000 FTE on the list.

Analemma_ 6y ago
There often are exceptions for execs for rules like this, which can cause their own sets of problems. I was at Microsoft when Steve Ballmer sent the company-wide email announcing he was going to step down; Reply All was disabled for most people, but some poor VP in MSR, who I guess was high enough up to be an exception, accidentally reply-all'd the whole company with his positive reaction to the announcement. That guy must've had an awkward day.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I find it sometimes interesting to skim through trivial (praise/reaction) and nontrivial (response/correction) reply-all threads to gain a better understanding of the social dynamics, attitudes, etc. across different departments in a company. In other words, while they aren't always useful for immediate work, they sometimes help with metawork.

xxpor 6y ago

There's no faster way for me to know that someone is a person I'd never want to work with than if they participate in a reply all storm. It's 2020. Learn how email works.

kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
I participate in every email reply-all storm. Because I'm not a soulless, joyless, curmudgeon who gets upset by receiving emails "oh noes my inboxzero!" And it's funny.
- xxpor 6y ago
  Well, I should have been more clear. I enjoy the trolling responses, not the ones from people who have been at a company for 5 years and haven't figured out how to unsubscribe themselves from an email list.
Traster 6y ago
Sometimes it's fun to pretend you don't know how email works and 'accidentally' completely fuck up your company/university email system for a few hours.

mav3rick 6y ago

Story time - Steve Ballmer sends an email to the entire company about buying Nokia. Some high level exec replies all and says "Told you so ". To which Ballmer also replies all with a smiley. Don't know if they knew they were replying all. Or if they didn't care. Quite bizarre.

bzb3 6y ago

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/me-too/ba-p/610643 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/me... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121015-00/?p=6333 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121015-00/?p=63...