Companies Disabling 'Reply-All' Button, Rather Than Dealing With Inane Email Threads
from the one-way-to-deal-with-the-problem dept
Last month, the US State Department made plenty of news for threatening to punish employees who misused the "reply-all" button on their email clients. That, by itself, seemed a bit extreme, but Jeremy Wagstaff alerts us to the fact that some organizations are going a step further and figuring out ways to disable the reply-all button entirely. The latest to do so is Nielsen, which did so with a cheery memo to staff explaining why this would "reduce non-essential messages in mailboxes, freeing up our time as well as server space." That's one way to think about it.![Hide This Hide this](https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/topclose.png)
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What if the employee...
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Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
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Re: Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
Oh, and then they'll never learn anything...
Hey! And then we could enslave them and say it for their "security!"
Let's do it!
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Re: Re: Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
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Re: Re: Re: Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
If there were really a concern about DUI safety, the cars would know when you're drunk and pull you over--no "black perros" involved.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
Are you sure DUI laws don't exist to "save the children"?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
using DUI laws to keep the people who swerve all over off the streets is good, using them to lockup or fine the guy sleeping it off in the back of his car is bad.
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Re: Re: Re: Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
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Re: Re: Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
At a firm I used to work for there was an employee who could not keep from opening every attachment that was sent her way despite being told not to open anything that didn't come directly from us or one of our clients(this was before spam got really tricky).
Our solution? We setup the mailserver to send the mail to us first to be approved and then we'd have the server resend it to her. There was simply no other solution short of firing her. These days, I'd have recommended the latter and been done with it.
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Re: Re: Re: Oh, the stupid people I have seen.
And verify that it sends a copy to personal.
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People are people
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I don't get it
Yes, yes, there are dufusses, but that is what training is for.
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It's quite common for people high up in companies (typically the higher the more likely I've noticed) to think that what they have to say to something is important for everyone to hear it, when really it only affects 2-3 people.
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The only people I've seen mis-use it, were the less savvy senior management.
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Problems and solutions
Sure, it would be better done via a multi party IM session, but seriously, do you think that an IT department that takes away the reply to all button would have a decent instant message strategy, especially one that is accessible to everyone involved?
The best thing to do would be to higher smarter employees and make sure that they don't have all this extra time on their hands to worry about an erroneous e-mail that would take far less time to ignore than to reply to. Then have your IT department implement instant messaging, presence, and online meeting spaces.
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Re: Problems and solutions
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Re: Re: Problems and solutions
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Try MS Groove
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Just separate the buttons...
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Not really. I'm working on a rather large project at work now, sometimes we have members of many different teams working in tandem to get a task done. It can be three people or 30 people...
When some messages come in, it's important to use 'reply to all' so that all the people in the message get the reply. It certainly saves me time, that way I don't have to CTRL-C and CTRL-V.... plus it helps to eliminate missing people on the list, etc...
As parts of the project are in different areas of the country and/or support personnel change, there's no way to really do a distribution list - since it would change almost daily.
Speaking of which, the employees will soon learn to be adept at copying and pasting - which would make all the time wasted on eliminating the 'reply to all' button a huge waste.
It's really a matter of user training; not the email applications - they only 'reply to all' when you tell them to.
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Lots of stupid people in the world
I work with one a*****e who regularly sends to everyone in the firm emails attaching articles that he thinks we should all read to make us better people.
I was involved in a transaction where an email went out laying out in a matter of fact way some problems that had been encountered in negotiating a deal and one of the recipients immediately sent a reply all that started "tell those a*****es" that ..." not realizing that the other side had been included in the original email.
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Reply All is Useful
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Gmail
In the business world, the Reply to All button should be removed from the quick menu bars but not the actual drop down menus. This doesn't prevent the use of reply to all, but rather makes it a more conscientious decision.
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Zappos.com Reply all hat
http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos/2008/12/15/the-story-behind-the-replyall-hat
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Wy can't you....
Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V disabled too?
Can't make anything idiot-proof because idiots are so ingenious.
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Reply All is essential to work
I would be annoyed when someone cc's a bunch of people who will all want the reply and I have to hand enter every email address. Clearly this company is only looking at the problem and forgetting that the solution may be worse than the initial problem. You would think someone in their IT department would tell them a better way or of the values of reply all.
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The Real Problem Is With Mass E-mail Distribution Lists
I'd go further and say it is *entirely* on the folks who insist on e-mailing dozens or hundreds of people in the CC field.
In many cases not only is this annoying but it is downright stupid because it reveals information that the recipients don't need to know about the rest of the recipients.
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