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Comment by nofinator | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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