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Comment by russnewcomer | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the story Larry Osterman told about Bedlam DL3 [0] at Microsoft. I feel like this is a problem with few good, problem-free technical solutions.

[0] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...

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"Do you really want to send this e-mail to 1,000,000 people?

[Yes, really] [No]"

With the latter option being focused by default and emphasized?

Yes, doing that is tricky deployment-wise with open protocols, but isn't the whole point of solutions like Exchange to enable system-wide shortcuts like that?

With an open solution the next best option is probably to have the mail server send a confirmation request email back to the user with a link to click if they really wanted to send it, instructions on how to reply with a confirmation etc.

This feature exists in Exchange! It's called MailTips. It warns senders in Outlook and Outlook Web App before sending of a number of conditions (including sending to a "large audience").

I was the PM who owned MailTips when it was created/introduced, and our research at the time showed it would be effective for preventing reply-all storms.

Implementing this is, of course, harder than you think. The size of groups has to be calculated nightly and distributed to every server, since groups can be nested (and have duplicate recipients).

There you go. :)

So this is what it feels like to predict the past...

I found that it's enabled and configured to 25 by default. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj649091%28v=exc...

(Nice url.)

I was assuming the NHS runs on Microsoft. Does anyone know?

It's funny how often it seems like software authors have a time machine. As soon as you get frustrated enough to make a feature request, they go back in time to implement it and pretend like it was always available.

From my own experience: Once you reach an audience in the hundreds of millions you're bombarded with edge cases issues daily..you just chose to prioritize addressing them or not.

That they make it to the mainstream, which in this case caused us to have this specific conversation is very unusual and can take a lot of time.

yes it runs on exchange/ outlook and outlook web access

At Google they had modified gmail at one point to take an email that was going to go to a lot of people and send it to your manager for approval. That worked pretty well. I believe the data indicated that sending it to anyone else for them to sign off on it helped. You could override a disapproval and send it anyway but that essentially created a willful act that later could be used as part of the reasoning behind your dismissal :-)

Do you remember circa when this was? I was there for a few years and I remember a couple of amusing incidents of people sending "I'll be late today" to thousands of 10k+ people. Presumably that wasn't manager-approved.

this was late 2000's (2008? 2009?) and you could circumvent it by typing "my manager has approved this email" or something.

Ah okay, that was a year or two before my time

How many recipients were required to meet the "a lot" threshold? Really depressing place to work at if your manager is spying and micro managing you at this level.

An email of that scale I often run by my manager anyway, simply because he's better than I am at writing things in a politically savvy fashion.

This is also better than Outlook's solution, which is simply "you can't send to that mailing list at all".

Where I work the really big lists are all moderated, with only 3-5 people allowed to post to the list. If you need to post something there, you mail one of the moderators the text you want sent on the list, together with an explanation what it is about and why you can't target a smaller number of recipients.

Email got a lot more boring since this was introduced.

That sounds like the corporate version of the Soviet Union. Oh, you want to have a meeting with more than five people?

Please fill out the reason for that on this form and we'll get back to you.

It shouldn't even be an option for the vast majority of employees. Rather than their email being a binary permission (you either can or cannot send to members of the domain), it should have more access levels, including a higher access level "can send to MANY members of the domain" that would not be granted to most employees. Most employees would be in the middle tier, which would allow emails sent only up to some number of manageable recipients. And of course the big distribution lists that go to large numbers of employees should be configured so that only a small number of accounts can post to them.

>it should have more access levels.

Something about that sounds so fascist.

Gmail's mute feature is a pretty good countermeasure for this sort of thing, at least at an individual level.

I just had to stop reading, the bad math was too bad (a quarter of 100000 is 13000, then it becomes briefly 25000 and goes back to 13000, and 10% of 13000 is 130...)

There were 55,000 people, but 100,000 mailboxes.

1/4 of 55,000 = 13,0000.

That seems to have been where the writer got confused.

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