Business, Economics, and Taxes: Capitalism. Yay? >=(

[RaceBoarder]

Business/tech related. A tech manager in my company sent out a Happy Birthday email to one of her coworkers. She included three different distribution lists on her message, and her own direct manager. Now we're in the process of pulling together our emergency tech response team to deal with the Reply All storm that's threatening to take down a portion of our email services. We don't need to be hacked to be brought down, we just need to keep hiring Reply-All Idiots...and well wishers.

Dumb question:

Why isn't there a "Are You Sure you want to send this to _____ people?" conformation when using "reply all"?

 

[ScoobyDoo]

Dumb question:

Why isn't there a "Are You Sure you want to send this to _____ people?" conformation when using "reply all"?

Cause email is a cesspool. It is such an insecure pile of garbage "non" standards that is just a nightmare to administer and deal with.

 

[St. Clown]

Dumb question:

Why isn't there a "Are You Sure you want to send this to _____ people?" conformation when using "reply all"?

There is. When you add a distribution group to an email it will add a blurb (X people are in this group). The problem is that the woman who started it manages a tech team. She sends messages like this to various groups all the time. She's likely seen them in half the email she sends. This time she just didn't see how many thousands of people were actually impacted. All for a happy birthday email.

I really hope Holly (the b-day girl) is having a jolly day!

 

[Handyman]

I HATE the reply all button. Living in Idaho, most people I work with are already extremely computer illiterate (none of my employees understands word or basic excel), and all of them type via the hunt and peck method. We got a new phone system set up recently and had to set up some new passwords for an app portion of it. One guy decided he needed a password that was at least 20 characters long. And then he could never seem to type it the exact same when having to confirm it. It was agony trying to help him and watch him hunt and peck for a solid 20 minutes before we got the entire process complete.

I get several emails a day that were "reply all" when they did not need to be. But thankfully not to the point you describe above.

You work with Louie Gohmert?

I have students that hit reply all in response to my class emails. I teach business tech...I might start failing them for their stupidity.

 

[St. Clown]

Continuing with the business tech help...I just received an email from a guy who says he can't get his work computer connected to his home WIFI. He sent the email from his work laptop while at home, and not using a cellular hotspot.

 

[Kepler]

I HATE the reply all button.

The best is when somebody hits reply all to a company wide message and then people reply all to scold him.

My company has 195,000 employees.

 

[Kepler]

Continuing with the business tech help...I just received an email from a guy who says he can't get his work computer connected to his home WIFI. He sent the email from his work laptop while at home, and not using a cellular hotspot.

So now you know he stole the company server and installed it in his basement.

 

[Handyman]

Continuing with the business tech help...I just received an email from a guy who says he can't get his work computer connected to his home WIFI. He sent the email from his work laptop while at home, and not using a cellular hotspot.

 

[St. Clown]

The best is when somebody hits reply all to a company wide message and then people reply all to scold him.

My company has 195,000 employees.

That's exactly what happened today. And while my company has 250k employees, but the company-wide distribution lists are limited to use by one a few people. And all of recipients on those emails are on a BCC list.

 

[Kepler]

That's exactly what happened today. And while my company has 250k employees, but the company-wide distribution lists are limited to use by one a few people. And all of recipients on those emails are on a BCC list.

Yep, it has to be a perfect storm because company-wide emails are almost always sent from send-only accounts (if you reply to them it bounces local to your machine and doesn't even hit the server, for this exact reason).

It can really only happen if some moron exec who actually has access to an alcon distrib sends from their personal email. And invariably it is some dink sending self-serving "let's celebrate the Warfighter / shareprice / remember our Fallen Heroes (sniff)" maudlin derp.

 

[Proud2baLaker]

The best is when somebody hits reply all to a company wide message and then people reply all to scold him.

My company has 195,000 employees.

Good lord. We have a couple hundred tops and less than half have company email. My reply-all are usually only 10 people or so replying and it still drives me mad.

 

[Proud2baLaker]

You work with Louie Gohmert?

I have students that hit reply all in response to my class emails. I teach business tech...I might start failing them for their stupidity.

Most people in this company (except the folks in accounting, sales, and distribution) use excel as a basic calculator for addition only. That's about all they understand about it. I made what I feel was a fairly simple, multi-sheet workbook to track fish eggs/spawning across a few farms about year and a half ago in order to condense things down from multiple workbooks and make it so multiple users could access it. Most complicated thing it had was some IF statements embedded within other IF statements and then a few sheets referring back to others and some conditional formatting. When I went over it with some other managers they just glazed over completely. I had to make sure that I password protected individual cells with formulas in them because these guys would erase things and just type numbers in rather than letting it do the work for them.

 

[Slap Shot]

Haha.

Wow Kepler I thought my company was large.

BTW I can't remember the last time I saw a, "reply all" clusterfack.

 

[mookie1995]

That's exactly what happened today. And while my company has 250k employees, but the company-wide distribution lists are limited to use by one a few people. And all of recipients on those emails are on a BCC list.

Or the “please remove me” reply all to the reply all :^

 

[St. Clown]

Or the “please remove me” reply all to the reply all :^

That's what always creates the Death Spiral for the email system.

Tip: When one of those happens, and you're using MS Outlook, in the Home ribbon there's an Ignore button. Just select the offending email chain without popping it out from the main app window, and click the Ignore button. It will delete all of the emails from your inbox in that chain and then auto-delete all future incoming emails with that same subject line. If needed, the offending emails can all be found in the Deeted Items folder.

 

[Kepler]

Or the “please remove me” reply all to the reply all :^

I had an IT guy who became so enraged by those replies that he wrote a script so that the reply purge would bypass those whose replies included "remove" or other strings, so they would get every subsequent reply plus every system status message. Then he sent out a message saying "this is not a bbs, do not ever reply 'remove'," got his chips, sat back, and waited. We worked at an Ultrix OSF/1 shop with a sh-t ton of ancient, grumpy usenet, darpanet, and other tech bbs techies. They eventually figured it out but it was hysterical watching them literally jump out of their seats.

 

[Fighting Sioux 23]

That's what always creates the Death Spiral for the email system.

Tip: When one of those happens, and you're using MS Outlook, in the Home ribbon there's an Ignore button. Just select the offending email chain without popping it out from the main app window, and click the Ignore button. It will delete all of the emails from your inbox in that chain and then auto-delete all future incoming emails with that same subject line. If needed, the offending emails can all be found in the Deeted Items folder.

Thank you for the Tip. I'm on a list serve for the ABA, and it seems every time they send out the quarterly newsletter, we have the the Death Spiral. Your Tip is a lifesaver. : - )

 

[mookie1995]

I had an IT guy who became so enraged by those replies that he wrote a script so that the reply purge would bypass those whose replies included "remove" or other strings, so they would get every subsequent reply plus every system status message. Then he sent out a message saying "this is not a bbs, do not ever reply 'remove'," got his chips, sat back, and waited. We worked at an Ultrix OSF/1 shop with a sh-t ton of ancient, grumpy usenet, darpanet, and other tech bbs techies. They eventually figured it out but it was hysterical watching them literally jump out of their seats.

Fkin awesome!

 

[dxmnkd316]

I saved the list of names of everyone who did that the last time my company suffered one of those chains. If I ever manage one of them, I'll find a reason to fire them.

 

[LynahFan]

Back in the early 2000s, I worked for Lockheed Martin (110,000 employees). They started an employee group called NEON (new employees opportunity network) because, you know, the attrition rate among new employees was a few basis points above be the optimal value for shareholders. The kickoff was an email from a VP’s personal account to all employees who had been with the company for less than two years. I had 200+ relply-all’s within 30 minutes, roughly half of which were “please remove me from this list.” Best response by far was from the kid who replied-all “I’m not wearing any pants!” only to retract that statement and issue an extremely flowery, inappropriate apology (via reply-all, natch) later on after the VP’s admin chastised everyone and reminded them that there were something like 9 VPs on distribution.

To be fair, this was entirely predictable, and could have easily been avoided. It’s called “BCC,” folks!