When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed? | Hacker News Reader

When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?

nytimes.com

74 pointspodopie43 comments

Relevant Wikipedia page, since the article is completely lacking in historical context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm

"On 14 October 1997, a Microsoft employee noticed that they were on an as-yet unknown email distribution list 'Bedlam DL3', and emailed the list asking to be removed. This list contained approximately a quarter of the company's employees, 13,000 email addresses. Other users replied to the list with similar requests and still others responded with pleas to stop replying to the list. A Microsoft employee estimates that 15 million emails were sent, using 195 GB of traffic."

And because they were dogfooding Exchange server they ended up fixing several bugs: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...

A net plus for Microsoft, I would say.

> To prevent anything like this happening in the future, we added a message recipient limit to Exchange – the server now has the ability to enforce a site-wide limit on the number of recipients in a single email message, which neatly prevents this from being a problem in the future.

Seems like they added a limit instead of fixing the actual problem.

The bananas in the break room incident and most recently Reuters.

edit: Atos that's a new one. But no bananas? I'm disappointed.

The "free bananas in the kitchen" story. http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...

This happened a few times at the bank I worked at for almost a decade.

You could count on the technologists to not throw gas on the fire by replying (everyone'd heard of Bedlam DL3), but once non-technical sales, trading and ops were on the list, all bets were off.

Well, aside from the trolling devs. At my company there've been a couple incidents of this where someone jumps on the thread with advice like "Unsubscribe has to be in the title" or "You have to BCC the list!". When that happens... oh dear god.

One time someone figured out you could send an email to everyone in the university network with one command as everyone was in a Gmail group. That person started an email chain that lasted a few months.

When I got accepted to one university's CS program, they emailed congratulations to everyone who was accepted... on cc rather than bcc. I couldn't help but immediately take advantage of the situation, and the ensuing storm resulted in the admissions officer getting exceedingly angry and threatening revoking admission upon further misconduct. Fun times.

Last week we had mailstorm with ~11k people. A significant fraction of the company.

Me, too!

Anyone who has worked for Amazon has heard tales of "UNSUBSCRIBE"

Crusty though the software is, this is why list-hosts matter. Reply all is a terrible way to manage group communication by email. list-name@lists.domain.com is a pretty decent way to go about it. Emails that get distributed have a [list-name] tag prepended to the subject line for trivial filtering on the client side. You can set a large list to require moderation before distributing messages (except from a list of blessed senders). You can tell the software to set the Reply-To header to the sender's email, rather than the list's address, so that the "Reply" and "Reply all" buttons have the expected behavior. And there is self-service subscribe/unsubscribe via a web interface (with permissions, of course).

My university operates such a server and it's heavily used by everyone from department announcements to student organization coordination/discussion.

https://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/

This is purely anecdotal, but I am seeing far fewer replyallpocalypses than I did 10-15 years ago.

Has something changed, like better server or client email software? Or perhaps admins and users are more savvy about avoiding this kind of behavior?

(Maybe I've just been lucky to not have to deal with one of these for several years.)

I've seen maybe 1 a year over the past 5 years. The best ones are the ones that are sent out by accident, like, cc'ing in the distribution list to EVERY employee by mistake.

I love it and hate it, I find it laughable that it just keeps on going, but it makes me sad that some humans cannot grasp what they are doing, nor learn from the example, and this is in huge global organisations too, full of supposedly professional, educated people!

My favourite one of all time though is when a reply-all chain (office wide, think 1000+ recipients....) was fully in its stride and someone attached a 10mb animated GIF.

Needless to say, I don't think the people managing the Outlook Exchange servers had a good day that day trying to cope with that one...

I've seen flamewars where someone would copy the entire text of Beowulf into the reply just so that everyone would have dozens of copies of it that would be dragged around every time someone added something to the chain.

I think in general overuse of "reply all" has been publicly shamed in recent years. Internet etiquette has evolved past sending chain mail office jokes.

The Washington Post carries a comic strip called "Reply All". It is not particularly tech-oriented, striking me as a millenial version of the old "Cathie" comic strip.

Better administrative discipline is my guess. Exchange has had the ability to restrict sending privileges for distribution lists for many years now. My last company was very careful about access control and we never had replyallpocalypses.

> This is purely anecdotal, but I am seeing far fewer replyallpocalypses than I did 10-15 years ago.

Everywhere I've worked email has slowly started taking a back seat to chat clients. Initially it was only email. Lots of Reply Alls. Then most of the places I went to use Google Chat and sometimes you'd just bring in multiple people at once. Hell or even a Google Hangout. Today most seem to go straight for Slack with email being secondary.

I don't think people care about email nearly as much anymore.

Outlook defaults to Reply (sender only), and many systems will flag large numbers of CC entries as spam. Also, people have moved so much of their correspondence to Facebook etc.

I think it's mostly that users are more sophisticated although there are also tools to mute threads (and to fold messages into threads in the first place), etc. which may help on the margins. Admins are also probably a bit smarter in setting mailing list defaults and, in at least some cases, setting up filters for certain lists.

For me: I just ignore most emails people send and use slack.

In fact, I avoid reading around 80% of my emails. Too much noise not enough signal. The signal usually comes with a lot of human interference making it difficult to figure out what it means.

However, systems which email me things automatically? An, overwhelming amount of noisy emails.

Maybe some MTAs now warn if a message is going to be sent to a large number of people? A simple "This message is going to be sent to 15,000 people, are you sure you want to send it?" message would work wonders I bet.

My outlook client will do that. I assume that scares enough people away.

Had this happen last year. Set up a rule to auto send to spam with the emails subject title in outlook. Done.

Why was the answer in a PDF? I don't understand. The increased casualness of the NYT lately has been bothering me.

My best guess: The article is about an online faux pas, and hyperlinking to a PDF when an HTML page would be perfectly sufficient is a self-aware nod to another online faux pas. (Fellow HN user oneeyedpigeon points out this faux pas in their comment.)

My seventh-best guess: The NYTimes' CMS lacks support for actual footnotes, so linking to another page is the next best thing. But since the footnote doesn't make complete sense unless you've come from the main article, the web editors didn't want the other page to be easily discoverable. Problem is, the CMS automatically makes any article styled as a regular article SEO-friendly, so they decided to work around that by putting the text into a less-SEO-friendly PDF.

When I want to publish some text on the open internet, should I put it all in a print-focussed file format instead of the HTML standard?

No.

Content of the ridiculous article in PDF

By Daniel Victor

O.K., here’s a little more context, for those of you who need it.

It begins when an innocuous email that you probably don’t need lands in your inbox (as it did mine on Thursday).

Soon someone inevitably replies (all): “Please remove me from this email chain.”

Then another: “Unsubscribe.”

Soon, dozens of people are replyingall, sending their fruitless requests to people who are equally annoyed. Notifications on your phone won’t stop buzzing.

This is known as the dreaded replyallpocalypse.

When you are in this situation, the logical, expert opinion is: Do not hit “reply all.”

You will only make things worse.

Another option: If you’re using Gmail, you could mute the conversation and go on with your day.

Otherwise, hunker down. We’re all in this together, and it’ll all be over soon.

I mostly don't experience this, with one notable exception. My uni's computer science department administrator has a mailing list for my entire class (~80 students). Whenever she sent out an email blast, it would appear to come from her email address, but for god knows what reason, the Reply-To address was set to the mailing list's address.

So basically every time someone had something they needed to discuss with the dept admin after an email blast went out, they would end up sending their response to the entire CS class. No matter how many times it happened, there would always be that one person who hadn't yet learned not to reply to the email blasts.

"The New York Times’s internal email system contributed to this report."

For those who wonder (also mentioned in the article) in gmail there is a feature called "mute" exactly for this.

Couldn't an "unsubscribe" functionality be written into an email server? You'd have to change the way mailboxes are stored. In particular, email threads and recipients lists would have to become explicit objects in a distributed database. Perhaps threads could be identified by a canonicalized version of the original recipients list, plus some other information?

Or you could just reply to the list itself with the word 'remove' in the subject (doesn't work for all list servers). That's how most servers handled subscriptions back in the days and probably still is now.

That would work for a LISTSERV -- but this is a special kind of server that does keep the list as an explicit object. If it's a recipients list in a regular email, that would be different.

At a former job someone sent a completely inane email asking about something personal to an HR email list or all people in the company, about 21,000 people.

Why does such an email list even exist? For some kind of HR emergency? Aren't there other emergency messaging systems that could be more effective?

At my company, certain lists can only be used by certain people to prevent exactly this sort of thing.

Perhaps they implemented such a restriction afterwards. Fortunately I never found out; perhaps they did.

As mentioned by the pdf, "Muting or ignoring conversations" in Gmail: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/47787?hl=en

My employer just issued written notices to people sending mails to "Territory All" type addresses without good reason. I mean it asks you 3 fk'in times "Are you sure???"...