"Reply All" shuts down German Bundestag Mail (Google translate) | Hacker News Reader

"Reply All" shuts down German Bundestag Mail (Google translate)

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10 pointsVMG8 comments

I love dragging this out:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2004/04/08/10962...

tl;dr - Bedlam DL3, a famous "Me too" reply-all incident at Microsoft in 2004, on the order of 15 million total messages.

That's a funny coincidence. Exactly the same thing happened at the large British financial organisation I work for today. What kind of person sends a "Please don't reply-all" message with reply all?

It would make a lot of sense if people actually listened to the advice and stopped replying-all. Terminating the chain-reaction would easily easily be worth the price of one reply-all, but in reality enough people would ignore the advice.

But hitting "Reply All" makes everyone know (think) that you're working!

I kid, I kid...

I think the issue is that many people would react, but when they read the emails in the thread one by one they might decide to respond before getting to the advice. Similar to what happened to me lately when I sent out information that I can't make the meeting, then some time later that I'll be there, but have to run away early, then something else again (over a couple of hours). When the recipient came to the office, he rescheduled the meeting 3 times in 5 minutes instead of reading all the emails first.

Is it bad though? Should we really expect people to process all emails at once and only then act on them?

A reply-all debacle occurred where I was a consultant a couple years back (at a quasi-government corporation with 5000 employees).

In this case, "Should we really expect..." is like saying "should we really expect people to read a dozen emails before sending 5000?" Yea, I think so.

One of our consultants wrote off a sarcastic reply-all email in response detailing what the reply all button actually did as if explaining to 5 year olds. The client demanded that this person be fired.

From http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/16/replyall/ ("Start an electronic food fight to spot the dumb ones"): "I suspect this person was performing a masterful troll (...)"

This may be too charitable, though.

Wow, that's an horrific translation. Google Translate usually does much better. I guess it has still problems with more informal blogposts but does a decent job with journalistic texts.

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