MetaFilter, back in January, published a post detailing several gaffes caused by hitting “reply-to-all” instead of “reply.”
Standard IT geek watercooler fare.
One comment, however, was particularly noteworthy. An e-mail from a secretary in the U.K., wished to notify those on her floor that there were “Free bananas in the kitchen!!!”. However, she accidentally sent it, not to her entire floor, but to everyone in the multinational corporation she was employed at.
Automated “Out-Of-Office” messages, sent to “reply all” started clogging up the system – in addition to the manually entered “please unsubscribe me from this list,” various angry threats, etc. These automated out of office messages themselves prompted other automated out-of-office messages.
This was bad enough but… well, I’ll just let you read the whole story.
For Exchange administrators, there is luckily a way to disable the “reply all” button in Outlook. The option still exists but requires more mouse clicks.
It just goes to show you that not all performance problems are caused by misconfigured servers, worms, secret FTP sites, etc… sometimes it’s just a combination of human ignorance and exponential growth that brings down your network – or at least your e-mail system.
This is especially important when you’re worried about VoIP, Video IP, virtualization… er… other words that start with “V”… Oh! The Conficker Worm. That starts with a Double V. I know it’s called a “double U” but it really looks more like a double V to me… Point is, you can worry a lot about all these new technologies on the network, but basic, simple data apps like e-mail still need careful care and planning.
Though to be fair, Gmail’s new “unsend” feature will help.
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