Why not just have an easy button that you can click saying Do Not Allow Reply All?
I know that there are some ways you can limit reply-all availability, like in the URL linked here. But there’s a note: If recipients open this email in other mail applications except Microsoft Outlook, such as opening on web page via web mailbox, they can reply all this email.
I’m semi-tech savvy but I’m no programmer. It feels like it should be easy to do, so either I’m totally wrong or email services are really missing out on a great thing they could do.
Step 1: draft an email to yourself
Step 2: put all recipients in the BCC
Step 3: now “reply all” does jack shit
I use BCC semi-frequently at work because it prevents all kinds of (mostly unintentional) annoyances from my coworkers. Mostly with automated emails related to reports and/or our case management system. BCC is your best friend when used selectively.
Just don’t use it for mass mailing external addresses. That’ll get you on a blacklist faster than you’d think.
Just don’t use it for mass mailing external addresses. That’ll get you on a blacklist faster than you’d think.
What do you mean by this?
My favorite thing is when I notice the chain is emailing people who don’t need to see it and Reply All after moving them to BCC (I add a note saying “moved X to BCC” for transparency).
People love me :-)
They can, and do give the option for Enterprise support but not public/personal accounts. You will need to bcc if you don’t want others replying.
Yeah, I used to manage a Google account for a school district. I was able to disable the reply all for certain groups. My solution was to disable it for all groups except for one that I specifically created to allow it. The only members of that group had to be allowed in through a vote of our little tech committee which consisted of me and various upper level admins.
It worked quite well and it was hilarious listening to the students bitch that I had locked them out of one of the pranks they wanted to do.
When your recipient can “reply all”, that means you’ve exposed every recipient’s email address to all recipients.
At that point, “reply all” is just a convenience, without it they could just copy-paste the email addresses manually.
If you want to suppress that, don’t show everyone the email address of everyone else.
For internal mail, you can use BCC. For external, use a mailer service.
I worked for a startup that got bought by Oracle. Five whole years without a reply-all storm, but the first week we had hundreds of people reply all and it was hilarious watching the admins try and fail to convince people to stop replying all.
Wonder what the back end software is there. With Exchange reply-all storms are a thing of the past. I don’t have to convince anyone of anything to stop a reply all storm. Takes 2 minutes of setting up a transport rule. But the admin needs to be experienced enough to know that.
It was Oracle so they probably have a terrible internal email server that will have reply-all storm protection in a year or two.
I was working with the customer service software devs to migrate my team from Salesforce’s Desk.com (because Oracle hates Salesforce) and they said it would take 18 months to make a dropdown that you could type in and select a macro for a ticket. Eventually they gave up.
the admins should not be the ones convincing. Its the managers who have to wrangle behavior like that.
ah but you see even managers have mangers. I mean if the behavior goes all the way to ceo then its just company culture at that point.
I’ve pointed out that this issue could arrise so many times to companies with the all staff email. Every time they push back on wanting to define limited senders, “we don’t think it’s an issue/no one would do that!” Until someone sends an inappropriate email to the whole company, then it’s suddenly IT’s fault.
As the other commentors have said, this isn’t a problem with email services, it’s a problem with email users. If you put all the addresses in the “To:” or “CC:” boxes, its because you want someone to Reply All. If you want to prevent that, put all the recipients in the BCC box.
Its a good idea, but fortunately someone already solved it a good while back. Now we just need a PSA to teach people to stop cramming everyone in the wrong box.
People in my organization do this, and it’s great. The only downside to that is when you want recipients to know exactly who else the email was sent to. Not super common, in my experience, but it does occur.
