3 ms·

Reply all is the source of major pain in most large companies. Many folks will point to reply all "storms", where hundreds or thousands of drones will reply to

by lrm242 18y ago

Reply all is the source of major pain in most large companies. Many folks will point to reply all "storms", where hundreds or thousands of drones will reply to an email with a large distribution with something along the lines of: "Don't reply all!" Of course, each time someone does this with reply all, the snowball grows larger. An even worse use of reply all, in my opinion, is this underlying desire of most corporate cultures to drastically over communicate. Be it because they are trying to cover their butt or because they naively buy into "communication is good, therefore, I shall use a megaphone to speak to everyone". The end result of this is a reduction of email's effectiveness and standard conference call quotes such as, "Send me an email and put REALLY IMPORTANT in the subject so that I don't ignore it". It's pathetic. Email etiquette is, unfortunately, dead in corporate America. EDIT: In summary, Reply All doesn't ruin email, people ruin email. Or some such thing :).

jodrellblank 18y ago
In a similar vein, I think people go to far with "Email contains important information, therefore everyone must keep all email". A large percentage of email is dross, and a large percent of the text in any given email is dross or repeats (quoted text in reply/forwards). Filter out the important bits into a useful system and delete the email, I say. Or, in another way of saying it, buried deep in an email archive is not the best place for any given piece of information. Especially not any information that anybody else might ever need to look at - which, in a company, is quite a lot. The sheer effort of remembering what might be in there, the ensuing obligation to search your massive archive any time you need any information just in case (because you can't be sure if it's there or not), the minimal hassle of not finding most 'important' information and the large amount of 'information' that you will, in practice, never look at again makes it a dubious thing to do, IMO. Not to mention the hassle, disk space, database maintenance, backup bloat and on and on.

by lrm242 18y ago

jodrellblank 18y ago

In a similar vein, I think people go to far with "Email contains important information, therefore everyone must keep all email". A large percentage of email is dross, and a large percent of the text in any given email is dross or repeats (quoted text in reply/forwards). Filter out the important bits into a useful system and delete the email, I say. Or, in another way of saying it, buried deep in an email archive is not the best place for any given piece of information. Especially not any information that anybody else might ever need to look at - which, in a company, is quite a lot. The sheer effort of remembering what might be in there, the ensuing obligation to search your massive archive any time you need any information just in case (because you can't be sure if it's there or not), the minimal hassle of not finding most 'important' information and the large amount of 'information' that you will, in practice, never look at again makes it a dubious thing to do, IMO. Not to mention the hassle, disk space, database maintenance, backup bloat and on and on.