Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.
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Raymond Chen once told the story of "Bedlam DL3" - an "email storm" caused by thousands of people using "reply all".
So now, Microsoft announces that they have added a new feature to Exchange called "Reply All Storm Protection", and like so many things that Microsoft does, they have come up with a "solution" that is overly complicated.
I've always thought there is a very simple solution.
Reply All is something that is rarely needed and should be used very sparingly. All email programs/systems should display warnings and try to dissuade people from using Reply All as much as possible, especially if it would result in sending an email to a large number of people.
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@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
All email programs/systems should display warnings and try to dissuade people from using Reply All as much as possible, especially if it would result in sending an email to a large number of people.
Doesn't Outlook already do this?
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@loopback0
It does and I don't see a problem with the reply to all feature itself. What do you expect people to do? Add the same people again and again in the conversation?
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@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Reply All is something that is rarely needed and should be used very sparingly.
In my experience the number of email chains that utilize reply all correctly is greater than the number of chains that use it wrongly. It is just that the wrong uses invariably involve company wide emails and LOTS of people doing it and the correct usage is usually between a small set of people working through a problem.
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@Dragoon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Reply All is something that is rarely needed and should be used very sparingly.
In my experience the number of email chains that utilize reply all correctly is greater than the number of chains that use it wrongly. It is just that the wrong uses invariably involve company wide emails and LOTS of people doing it and the correct usage is usually between a small set of people working through a problem.
And typically it's not really a "reply to all" problem, at least in my experience. It's an address that goes out to a large group. The real solution is to BCC the large group so no one can accidentally reply to all. I suppose you could set some flag in Exchange that only allows certain addresses to be put into BCC and not TO or CC fields?
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I mostly have the reverse problem. Enormous chains which get unjustly 'reply all'ed are rare. It's more common for me to be one of 5-10 people on a thread, who doesn't really send emails on the thread but does rely on getting the emails others send on it to be kept informed.
And then there's also a recent case where an external team was keeping me in but consistently dropping my manager every time they replied, because they were trying to strong-arm me into something my manager didn't support.
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@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Reply All is something that is rarely needed and should be used very sparingly.
Really? I use it more often than regular Reply. Back when I was doing bug report analyses and had to
communicateplay a blame game with 5 to 8 other projects to find theroot causescapegoat, I was sending about 20 emails a day on average, and each had to be Reply All to an ever-extending list of recipients. If they implemented a warning for that, disabling it would be the first thing I'd do.
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@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Reply All is something that is rarely needed and should be used very sparingly.
I've used it a lot in my work, especially working with government clients. Email threads will get sent around with lots of people CC'ed, completely by design
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I don't remember Reply All ever being the problem, it's Replying to a huge mailing list set as the Reply-To. Once upon a time I wrote a Reply to Sender extension for Thunderbird when I was on a list where I was replying to individuals more than the list. :P
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@Parody said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Once upon a time I wrote a Reply to Sender extension for Thunderbird when I was on a list where I was replying to individuals more than the list. :P
Um... How's that different from regular Reply button?
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@Luhmann said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@loopback0
It does and I don't see a problem with the reply to all feature itself.Me either. It's needed more often than it isn't.
We have restrictions on who can send to some larger distribution lists to prevent accidental (or deliebrate) Bedlam-esque silliness but it's otherwise fine.
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@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
The real solution is to BCC the large group so no one can accidentally reply to all. I suppose you could set some flag in Exchange that only allows certain addresses to be put into BCC and not TO or CC fields?
That would require the people who legitimately send something to company wide mailing lists to do that. IME that’s people whose job it is to use nothing but outlook and word all day but don’t understand how these work.
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@Gąska The warning is if the number of recipients Outlook can see is greater than 50.
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@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Parody said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Once upon a time I wrote a Reply to Sender extension for Thunderbird when I was on a list where I was replying to individuals more than the list. :P
Um... How's that different from regular Reply button?
Reply selects the Reply-To if it's set, not the From or the Sender. (And it may have been Reply to From, not Reply to Sender; I don't remember any more. Bah.)
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@topspin said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
The real solution is to BCC the large group so no one can accidentally reply to all. I suppose you could set some flag in Exchange that only allows certain addresses to be put into BCC and not TO or CC fields?
That would require the people who legitimately send something to company wide mailing lists to do that. IME that’s people whose job it is to use nothing but outlook and word all day but don’t understand how these work.
That's how my former employer did it, using Lotus Notes. After, of course, a learning period where a lot of people triggered the original problem (nobody's mentioned the "please unsubscribe me from this list" aftereffect).
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@da-Doctah said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@topspin said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
The real solution is to BCC the large group so no one can accidentally reply to all. I suppose you could set some flag in Exchange that only allows certain addresses to be put into BCC and not TO or CC fields?
That would require the people who legitimately send something to company wide mailing lists to do that. IME that’s people whose job it is to use nothing but outlook and word all day but don’t understand how these work.
That's how my former employer did it, using Lotus Notes. After, of course, a learning period where a lot of people triggered the original problem (nobody's mentioned the "please unsubscribe me from this list" aftereffect).
Did you say gloves?
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@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Dragoon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Reply All is something that is rarely needed and should be used very sparingly.
In my experience the number of email chains that utilize reply all correctly is greater than the number of chains that use it wrongly. It is just that the wrong uses invariably involve company wide emails and LOTS of people doing it and the correct usage is usually between a small set of people working through a problem.
And typically it's not really a "reply to all" problem, at least in my experience. It's an address that goes out to a large group. The real solution is to BCC the large group so no one can accidentally reply to all. I suppose you could set some flag in Exchange that only allows certain addresses to be put into BCC and not TO or CC fields?
Mail systems that support defining group aliases tend to have a way to specify who can send to that group. Which, when configured correctly, helps to eliminate the problem. Because in order to reply to the entire group, an unauthorized user would need to deliberately expand the alias to get the members in the to address instead.
I'm not aware of any flags that would limit how that address can receive emails, such as the BCC only type setup you described.
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@TwelveBaud said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Gąska The warning is if the number of recipients Outlook can see is greater than 50.
In the scenario I described, the number of recipients rarely was under 100. And they were different recipients each time. TRWTF is using email for that in the first place, but still.
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@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
thousands of people using "reply all".
... resolved by filtering to another folder so I don't have to worry about it anymore.
IMO this is a great example of culture and education. You have a culture where people just "reply all", but few are educated enough to know how to filter to another folder, or think to do it.
I think there's an analogy here for global general culture and education as well, but I'm too lazy to figure it out.
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@Shoreline said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I think there's an analogy here for global general culture and education as well, but I'm too lazy to figure it out.
Facebook and Twitter make it incredibly hard (or even downright impossible IIRC) to filter your feed in any meaningful way. Not sure what it means, but seems related.
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@Shoreline said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
IMO this is a great example of culture and education. You have a culture where people just "reply all", but few are educated enough to know how to filter to another folder, or think to do it.
I'm not really sure it's a matter of culture and/or education. Many pieces of software have some sort of filter or another, but IME users almost never use them. I get the feeling that while it's a neat idea, somehow it either never works perfectly (e.g. there is one item that's not filtered and you get annoyed more than helped by the filter), or it doesn't work like people think (maybe it's too "computish" and not enough "human"?). Or something else. But it's definitely not just email filters, and it's not just "uneducated" users.
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@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Shoreline said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I think there's an analogy here for global general culture and education as well, but I'm too lazy to figure it out.
Facebook and Twitter make it incredibly hard (or even downright impossible IIRC) to filter your feed in any meaningful way. Not sure what it means, but seems related.
The children of the original "don't know how to filter" wrote Facebook and Twitter?
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@Gąska But, Facebook and Twitter's algorithms will always put the best (1) posts in your feed!
(1) Their definition. May not at all align with your preferences.
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@Shoreline said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
thousands of people using "reply all".
... resolved by filtering to another folder so I don't have to worry about it anymore.
The problem isn't so much that your inbox fills up as the email server gets overburdened and regular mail can't get through. At least, that's happened to me a few times. These were times when multiple thousands of people were on the distribution lists.
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@frillunflop said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
But, Facebook and Twitter's algorithms will always put the best (1) posts in your feed!
(1) Their definition. May not at all align with your preferences.
Fixed that! And FBPurity keeps it that way!
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Yeah, company wide emails (to ~1k people) with pics of the newborn have broken many a server.
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@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Reply All is something that is rarely needed and should be used very sparingly.
Strongly disagree. Management in my organization doesn't answer questions unless they are embarrassed in front of an audience and need to save face. Of course they figured that out and now all e-mails are broadcast via the BCC field.
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@dcon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Fixed that! And FBPurity keeps it that way!
Facebook still has Most Recent.
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@loopback0 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@dcon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Fixed that! And FBPurity keeps it that way!
Facebook still has Most Recent.
Which they will randomly toggle back to Top Stories when they feel like it.
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@dcon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@loopback0 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@dcon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Fixed that! And FBPurity keeps it that way!
Facebook still has Most Recent.
Which they will randomly toggle back to Top Stories when they feel like it.
Ah you mean FBPurity keeps it as default... I misunderstood.
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@Dragoon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Yeah, company wide emails (to ~1k people) with pics of the newborn have broken many a server.
My school wasn't big enough to actually crash anything this way, but these were the reply-all chains that irked me the most. Especially since the new parent wasn't usually looking at them. For goodness sake, tell the person in person! It's much more meaningful that way than firing off a blast to everyone.
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@Zenith said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@El_Heffe said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Reply All is something that is rarely needed and should be used very sparingly.
Strongly disagree. Management in my organization doesn't answer questions unless they are embarrassed in front of an audience and need to save face. Of course they figured that out and now all e-mails are broadcast via the BCC field.
While I agree with you (that Reply All is needed), I'm surprised by the number of people here who only ever mention variations of CYA as its justification.
Reply All, to me, is simply useful any time I'm talking to more than a single other person at a time. Which is, like... most of the time?
As soon as there is another developer working on something and someone (tester, user, whatever) asks a question about it, both (or more) devs are in the discussion. Or someone asks me if I can work on something and my boss will be in the discussion as well (and the reverse for people in my team). Or someone is asking a somewhat vague "how do I do this?" question and since maybe 2-3 other people may know the answer, they're all in the discussion. Or someone wants to discuss something that affects a few other people (be it changing some shared code, or basic janitorial stuff like who has got which book or whatever). Or... really, I have more difficulty coming up with cases where I want to talk to a single person than the opposite (well, not really, but almost).
It's rarely more than 3-4 people overall (me included), but I don't see how I could function without Reply All.
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Reply All, to me, is simply useful any time I'm talking to more than a single other person at a time. Which is, like... most of the time?
This.
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@Luhmann said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@loopback0
It does and I don't see a problem with the reply to all feature itself. What do you expect people to do? Add the same people again and again in the conversation?Email is not for conversations. Use a different method of communication.
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@xaade said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Luhmann said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@loopback0
It does and I don't see a problem with the reply to all feature itself. What do you expect people to do? Add the same people again and again in the conversation?Email is not for conversations. Use a different method of communication.
Yeah. Especially since email is strongly asynchronous. And deals really really poorly with context when multiple people are talking.
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IMO, reply all is only useful for fairly small groups and only if it's a one-off update.
The better way to handle it is to reply only to sender and they reply-all on their own original email to send out the correctly.
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@remi said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
While I agree with you (that Reply All is needed), I'm surprised by the number of people here who only ever mention variations of CYA as its justification.
Says alot about the state of the modern workplace, doesn't it? Now that I can't use it to embarrass answers out of management, it's exclusively a CYA tool for me as well.
It's fair to say I haven't worked in a healthy environment for a long time. I honestly cannot remember the last time an actual technical discussion occurred over e-mail. Management rarely even informs of us of decisions made in isolation, other developers prefer to spinlock for eternity, and I quickly find there's no value in asking either group for anything. Frankly, I would rather wade through a hundred pages of "you don't need..." and "just use Angular" on StackOverflow.
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@Gąska said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Parody said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Once upon a time I wrote a Reply to Sender extension for Thunderbird when I was on a list where I was replying to individuals more than the list. :P
Um... How's that different from regular Reply button?
Mailing lists intended for discussion are usually set up so that replies go to the list rather than the original sender. For example, through including a Reply-To or by using the list’s address as the From and moving the original sender’s address to something like Sender (or vice versa, not sure off the top of my head).
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@xaade
So snail mail is no conversation either? Stop this bullshit. There are several ways of communicating. You should choose the right one for the job. E-mail has it's place. And so does reply all.
E-mail has a formal component lacking in many other digital communication forms. I need that. I need the written consent that I'm connecting to a customer's system to investigate or fix something. Or what the fuck we discussed over the phone. It's asynchronous and that means the the recipient is in control of the timing. You'll get a reply on my timing, not on yours. This is not a negative thing, stop wanting stuff immediately.
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@Luhmann said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
So snail mail is no conversation either?
That's correct.
There are several ways of communicating. You should choose the right one for the job. E-mail has it's place. And so does reply all.
Also correct. Having a conversation is one way of communicating. Email is a different way. Both should be used in situations where they're appropriate.
E-mail has a formal component lacking in many other digital communication forms. I need that. I need the written consent that I'm connecting to a customer's system to investigate or fix something. Or what the fuck we discussed over the phone. It's asynchronous and that means the the recipient is in control of the timing. You'll get a reply on my timing, not on yours.
These are all attributes of a one way information flow. There are times when you need that, but it's not what a conversation is.
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@xaade said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Email is not for conversations. Use a different method of communication.
If only it was that easy to get everyone else to switch.
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@xaade said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
The better way to handle it is to reply only to sender and they reply-all on their own original email to send out the correctly.
Where more often than not they are going to just forward my email in its entirety so I might as well just reply-all and save the rigmarole.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@Luhmann said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
So snail mail is no conversation either?
That's correct.
You forgot a "
" emoji there. Alternatively 
would be acceptable.
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@Dragoon said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@xaade said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
Email is not for conversations. Use a different method of communication.
If only it was that easy to get everyone else to switch.
And then learn to use it and stick to it.
If I had a dollar for the times that somebody said "Yeah, Microsoft Teams or Slack isn't working on my Mac, hang on while I send you a Google Hangouts link"...
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@PleegWat Maybe it's because I'm a millennial who was raised when websites were already established, but email always seemed like a weird form of group communication.
To discuss a topic you want a "forum" style discussion where everyone sends messages to a single place and those messages are stored for everyone in the group to see. Sure you can replicate that with mailing lists and resending all messages to everyone in it, but that's a ridiculous amount of repetition.
I get that in the 90s email was the best you had, but why is it still the primary communication tool in big companies now that there's a bajillion other ones? I'd sooner set up a Discourse instance.
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@anonymous234 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I get that in the 90s email was the best you had, but why is it still the primary communication tool in big companies now that there's a bajillion other ones? I'd sooner set up a Discourse instance.
It's right there in a single app in one place that comes to you. You don't need to go look at multiple forums to get responses to different things. Those kinds of things are good for certain tasks (like ticketing systems). They're not so good for general purpose business communication.
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@JBert Speaking of Google Hangouts, the "Killed by Google..." thread is
.
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@anonymous234 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
discussion where everyone sends messages to a single place and those messages are stored for everyone in the group to see.
Replacing email with a forum-style system would be a fucking nightmare.
You'd not want email as the only method of communicstion and email's certainly not the best in every situation but there are plenty where it is.
@anonymous234 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I get that in the 90s email was the best you had, but why is it still the primary communication tool in big companies now that there's a bajillion other ones?
How many of those are better than email though?
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@boomzilla said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@anonymous234 said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
I get that in the 90s email was the best you had, but why is it still the primary communication tool in big companies now that there's a bajillion other ones? I'd sooner set up a Discourse instance.
It's right there in a single app in one place that comes to you. You don't need to go look at multiple forums to get responses to different things. Those kinds of things are good for certain tasks (like ticketing systems). They're not so good for general purpose business communication.
@TwelveBaud said in Solving the wrong problem. Wrongly.:
@JBert Speaking of Google Hangouts, the "Killed by Google..." thread is
.And email will still be around when these systems are long forgotten.
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@anonymous234 An e-mail can be saved. An e-mail can be referred to from a design document. An e-mail can be adressed to the customer and CC'd to a coworker, to the project manager and to someone from another team, so that everyone is informed even if they don't all have a particular software installed.
