Free bananas in the kitchen!!! (what happens when reply-all goes amok) | Hacker News Reader

Free bananas in the kitchen!!! (what happens when reply-all goes amok)

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51 pointsbd27 comments

My company makes people think twice about reply-alls. Check it out - http://vimeo.com/2543204

working for CV must be a blast. Tell Jake and Amir that I'm wearing their shirt as we speak..

That's the best solution to reply-all that I have ever seen.

haha. we had a pretty raucous "tie day" email thread at work once. everyone kept posting pictures of people wearing ties, or tye dyes, or colonel tigh, etc. lots of good fun, but definitely consuming way too much time and enjoyment to be productive.

finally the ceo stepped in to put an end to, though two higher ups still came back with even witty tie day references.

the joyfulness of that discussion brings a smile to my face.

OK, you must work somewhere sufficiently awesome if pictures of Tigh come up on Tie Day.

The Outlook and Exchange teams stress test their systems with the following Microsoft distribution lists: internz, gmrchat, failboat, lolcats, and bacon

If I was on the Outlook team at MS I'd have made the reply-all button 4x as big, for the lulz.

I am pretty sure with the Office Resource Kit you can disable it company-wide with a group policy, people just fire up Outlook one day and it's gone. No idea why Windows admins don't do that (you can still reply-to-all if you really want to using the Actions menu).

Reply-all doomsday scenarios seems like they could be avoided if reply-all is disabled when the count of recipients exceeds a certain number.

On a side note, one of my colleagues has a first+last name that is one hyphen off from one of our largest distribution (external) mailing lists. I usually IM him instead.

Right, but that doesn't necessarily help when the reply-all goes to one recipient... which is a mailing list with 60,000 people on it.

As the Wizards of the Coast promotional mailing list was, the first time this happened to me in my Magic-playing days. (Strangely enough, it was also configured to accept messages from people outside the company. This was, in hindsight, a bad call.)

offtopic:

you were going to post about spending $1000 for advertising http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420300

How is it coming along? :-)

Busy with paying customers (just released new version of BCC, putting out brush fires). Check back on weekend.

What's his name? All Staff?

In a (US) Embassy, there is something in place called the Warden Cascade System. It's a low-tech solution to help crisis management. Basically it's a pyramid scheme centered around phone calls. Someone triggers the cascade by calling a few people, and they each call a few people, and so forth; until the message has been conveyed to everyone it needs to be conveyed to.

Something like that would be handy in these sorts of situations - pick up the phone and call some offices, it's easier to manage these sorts of outbreaks as though you're dealing with many smaller entities than as one monolithic unit.

We had an epic email that got sent company wide and asked for donations to a church (complete accident; blame stupidity over malice). Took down the email servers for ~24 hours.

Note: 6000+ employee company

Best thing to do is generally.

Direct it to one person who is the responsible party and BCC everyone else. If it's a mass e-mail, then BCC everyone. I think it all starts from the top.

No! Please no! BCCs break everyones filters/rules. Some percentage of derailed threads end with "Moving DL to BCC" which drives me NUTS because I get this message in my Inbox which throws me off my rhythm while I try to figure out what the heck it is talking about.

Personally, I think BCC should be eliminated. I think that every reasonable use case for BCC can be accomplished with a send and then a separate forward. Is there something I'm missing?

I feel the opposite way: eliminate CC: and keep BCC:. People use CC: way too often when a BCC: is more appropriate. Unfortunately, the worst abusers are the most clueless and least likely to change.

My school used BCC to keep the name of the all student mailing list secret. Wise decision until the secretary forgot to put in in the right field.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429126 multinational + >25000 employees = lotsa fun...

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