haha. we had a pretty raucous "tie day" email thread at work once. everyone kept posting pictures of people wearing ties, or tye dyes, or colonel tigh, etc. lots of good fun, but definitely consuming way too much time and enjoyment to be productive.
finally the ceo stepped in to put an end to, though two higher ups still came back with even witty tie day references.
the joyfulness of that discussion brings a smile to my face.
The Outlook and Exchange teams stress test their systems with the following Microsoft distribution lists: internz, gmrchat, failboat, lolcats, and bacon
If I was on the Outlook team at MS I'd have made the reply-all button 4x as big, for the lulz.
I am pretty sure with the Office Resource Kit you can disable it company-wide with a group policy, people just fire up Outlook one day and it's gone. No idea why Windows admins don't do that (you can still reply-to-all if you really want to using the Actions menu).
Reply-all doomsday scenarios seems like they could be avoided if reply-all is disabled when the count of recipients exceeds a certain number.
On a side note, one of my colleagues has a first+last name that is one hyphen off from one of our largest distribution (external) mailing lists. I usually IM him instead.
Right, but that doesn't necessarily help when the reply-all goes to one recipient... which is a mailing list with 60,000 people on it.
As the Wizards of the Coast promotional mailing list was, the first time this happened to me in my Magic-playing days. (Strangely enough, it was also configured to accept messages from people outside the company. This was, in hindsight, a bad call.)
In a (US) Embassy, there is something in place called the Warden Cascade System. It's a low-tech solution to help crisis management. Basically it's a pyramid scheme centered around phone calls. Someone triggers the cascade by calling a few people, and they each call a few people, and so forth; until the message has been conveyed to everyone it needs to be conveyed to.
Something like that would be handy in these sorts of situations - pick up the phone and call some offices, it's easier to manage these sorts of outbreaks as though you're dealing with many smaller entities than as one monolithic unit.
We had an epic email that got sent company wide and asked for donations to a church (complete accident; blame stupidity over malice). Took down the email servers for ~24 hours.
Direct it to one person who is the responsible party and BCC everyone else. If it's a mass e-mail, then BCC everyone. I think it all starts from the top.
No! Please no! BCCs break everyones filters/rules. Some percentage of derailed threads end with "Moving DL to BCC" which drives me NUTS because I get this message in my Inbox which throws me off my rhythm while I try to figure out what the heck it is talking about.
Personally, I think BCC should be eliminated. I think that every reasonable use case for BCC can be accomplished with a send and then a separate forward. Is there something I'm missing?
I feel the opposite way: eliminate CC: and keep BCC:. People use CC: way too often when a BCC: is more appropriate. Unfortunately, the worst abusers are the most clueless and least likely to change.
This down-voting is getting absurd. I understand getting a few for this comment, but -11 is frankly uncalled for. PG even asked people to refrain from doing this many down votes in a recent post. I am learning from my mistake of posting this, but I am relatively new to the forums. At the least I should be given some time to understand the requirements for posting (on this topic, I did find a forum rules page, but I had to Google it to find it, there were not obvious links from the forum afaik.) All I'm asking is that new forum members get a friendly pointer on posting guidelines, rather than being slapped down by large numbers of downvotes. Thank you.
May I ask that if you downvote this you explain the reasoning behind your downvote? I don't see any real reason to downvote this comment, but I would like to hear your opinions on the matter.
Listen man, I feel your pain, as I also didn't think your "epic" is worthy of -12 score. What you shouldn't do though, is create your own thread bitching about it, because that is worthy of more down-modding.
Just delete your comment to stem the bleeding and move on. Don't worry, if you have a lot of worthy things to say, -11 will be easy to make up.
The one word "Epic" post adds absolutely nothing to this conversation, and your paragraph whining about being downmodded actually detracts from the conversation.
You can continue to whine about it, but understand that there are up AND down arrows for most of us; and we really appreciate comments that somehow contribute, instead of being "lulzy".
I'm not one to talk on valuable comments (although I do try, most of the time) yours did not add any value. I notice most comments on HN that don't add anything to the conversation (and usually, they come in the form of one-worders like yours) get downvoted.
P.S - I did not down vote you myself, but figured I would help explain to you why you are being down voted.
