Nielsen Deletes Reply-To-All Button | Hacker News Reader

Nielsen Deletes Reply-To-All Button

techcrunch.com

23 pointsbkrausz18 comments

reply-to-all is probably the major cause of e-mail overload and congestion so I think that this is an excellent idea.

It's basically a question of overall effectivity, meaning that the time spent on reading non-important e-mails should be kept to a minimum.

To play with some arbitrary numbers here's an example:

I receive an e-mail sent out to everyone in my department consisting of 50 people, and hit reply all to make a pun, correct a spelling mistake, or some other trivial matter. It is easy to hit reply all, and thus I do it since I think my pun is the funniest thing since LOLcats. Now there are 50 people who have to read my e-mail, or at least deal with it. If they on average spend 30 seconds doing so that is half an hour of productivity that has been lost. If ten e-mails go back and forth using reply-to-all (someone else might have an even funnier joke, and since you set the tone they will also hit the reply-to-all button) that is 5 hours of productivity lost.

If you really need to reply-to-all you can easily copy-paste the adresses. This will maybe take you two minutes, and will thus result in an overall fall in productivity of two minutes. A pretty stark contrast to the five hours...

Reply all is the source of major pain in most large companies. Many folks will point to reply all "storms", where hundreds or thousands of drones will reply to an email with a large distribution with something along the lines of: "Don't reply all!" Of course, each time someone does this with reply all, the snowball grows larger.

An even worse use of reply all, in my opinion, is this underlying desire of most corporate cultures to drastically over communicate. Be it because they are trying to cover their butt or because they naively buy into "communication is good, therefore, I shall use a megaphone to speak to everyone". The end result of this is a reduction of email's effectiveness and standard conference call quotes such as, "Send me an email and put REALLY IMPORTANT in the subject so that I don't ignore it". It's pathetic.

Email etiquette is, unfortunately, dead in corporate America.

EDIT: In summary, Reply All doesn't ruin email, people ruin email. Or some such thing :).

In a similar vein, I think people go to far with "Email contains important information, therefore everyone must keep all email".

A large percentage of email is dross, and a large percent of the text in any given email is dross or repeats (quoted text in reply/forwards). Filter out the important bits into a useful system and delete the email, I say.

Or, in another way of saying it, buried deep in an email archive is not the best place for any given piece of information. Especially not any information that anybody else might ever need to look at - which, in a company, is quite a lot.

The sheer effort of remembering what might be in there, the ensuing obligation to search your massive archive any time you need any information just in case (because you can't be sure if it's there or not), the minimal hassle of not finding most 'important' information and the large amount of 'information' that you will, in practice, never look at again makes it a dubious thing to do, IMO. Not to mention the hassle, disk space, database maintenance, backup bloat and on and on.

In my line of work (law), people can be offended or grow suspicious if they are left off of an e-mail. They don't want the feeling that a discussion is happening behind their back, or without their having the chance to give input. It's often better to load up your cc line than it is to risk offense.

Someone might be offended by being left off an inane pun thread? I'd love to be "offended" that way.

In essence, they're telling their employees they're too stubborn or stupid to follow guidelines and use their judgment when it comes to responding to email.

Looking at the average corporate employee they're probably right.

Since the parent got downmodded, I better explain myself a little better.

My point was that the average employee in a large corporation doesn't see the implications of a reply-to-all, and how much e-mail overload and lost time it amounts to down the road. This isn't implying that these employees are less intelligent or otherwise impaired, it is simply implying that this is not something an average employee would think about. Just like I will forget to change the oil in my car: Obvious to a mechanic, but I just don't think about it, or don't know.

My Fortune-100 employer just did almost the same thing-- buried the Reply All in a submenu under 'Reply'. It hasn't stopped the stupidity of people emailing their lunch orders to the entire division. Now I know that the EVP of site development likes turkey and cheese, no mustard.

I actually find the reply to all button quite useful. Often times there are several people in the office that should see a particular email thread (whether they choose to read it) and achieving this with just a reply button would be more than a little annoying.

I think this is a good option for "are you sure you want to send this to n people". (Of course, you would need a way to calculate how many people are on a distribution list.) It would be even better if it looked at the length and complexity of the email and attachments, estimated how long it would take to read, multiplied by an hourly cost of like $100/hr, and then made you at least aware of the cost...

Of course the issue is almost as contentious as emacs vs. vi, but in the interest of truth I will still say it: Reply-To-All is the button that makes correctly managed mailing lists work, because without it you cannot reply to a message on list. See http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html for the technical details.

I suspect that companies using Outlook do not use Internet-style mailing lists. It's a cultural mismatch.

Probably not helped by Outlook's irritating top quoting.

> It's a cultural mismatch.

I think this is overboard....instead of deleting the reply to all button, it should be limited to only 10-15 people.

Because if you limit reply to all button as it is..what happens if you need to reply to even 2 people?

I like the idea. "Reply all" is for twitter or a wiki. My inbox should consist only of messages that were specifically adressed (or in rare cases bcc’d) to me.

I removed the Reply-All button from my Outlook toolbar so that I have to right-click to use it. It definitely reduces the chance of accidentally replying-all.

If you read the article, sounds like it may have come about, in large part, due to an exec accidentally replying-all with an arrogant message that went to the whole company.

I doubt they're interested in paving the way to improve corporate email for corporate email's sake.

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