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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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 :-)

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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.

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