The advice at the end is pretty important - if you want the thread to die, just ignore it. All told people mostly followed this, and if only 120 replies were sent in an organisation as huge as the NHS then that's pretty incredible. In our company's "social" list the silly reply-all chains have a very predictable pattern, coming in a series of waves:<p>1. original sensible email like "hey guys, I have some honey/walnuts/fruit/spirits from my hometown if anyone wants to try/buy"<p>2. sensible replies start rolling in, but which were accidentally sent to all<p>3. some jokers/trolls send memes in response (also reply all)<p>4. the whining begins, people reply-all asking everyone to stop spamming them<p>5. the memers reply (sometimes with more memes) that it is the optional "social" list that's for this sort of nonserious/fun stuff.<p>6. some helpful problem-solvers weigh in, sending reply-all instructions (often including MS Paint'd diagrams) on how to unsubscribe from the list or apply an outlook filter<p>7. finally the "can everyone just stop replying to this though?" emails start, also reply-all (and apparently oblivious to the contradiction/irony of their own reply-all) and everyone participating starts to realise it should be ignored...<p>Once you recognise the pattern it becomes pretty enjoyable identifying which stage of this month's "Emailgate" you're currently at - the whole thing can around to 45-60 mins to play out.
Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.<p>So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.<p>It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...<p>...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:<p><a href="http://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard" rel="nofollow">http://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard</a>
For context, the NHS is one of the largest employers in the <i>world</i>. The list[1] currently goes:<p>- US Department of Defense<p>- The Chinese Army<p>- Walmart<p>- McDonalds<p>- The NHS<p>And The NHS's staff are all far more likely to actually have to use a computer and email in their day-to-day work than most of those Walmart and McDonalds employees.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers</a>
From the BBCs coverage (<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/37979456" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/37979456</a>), it seems like the problem was caused by a contractor setting up a full-org distribution list by mistake. This DL would have appeared as a single (unfamiliar) email address to most recipients, making it less obvious that "reply-all" would actually send a message to a million receipients.<p>The NHS resolved the issue by killing the offending DL reasonably quickly, which would stop further replies from being generated. This is also the reason why only about a hundred folks (out of a million) replied-all to the message.
This reminds me of the story Larry Osterman told about Bedlam DL3 [0] at Microsoft. I feel like this is a problem with few good, problem-free technical solutions.<p>[0] <a href="https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-too/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...</a>
I was caught in an email storm like this one time.
Someone at a large insurance company accidentally sent an email containing a few patient names/dobs to a group-email mailing list of at least 1000+ outside emails.<p>It took about 2 months before the storm finally ended.<p>It became comical how many responders to the email chastised the original sender for "HIPAA violations" using Reply-All thereby inadvertently committing the same infraction themselves because the original email was included at the bottom of the reply.<p>Also, several times, after 2-3 days of quiet, someone would come back from vacation and reply-all with "I think you sent this to the wrong person", thereby starting the storm all over again.<p>The company of the original sender seemed powerless to stop it, but I always wondered if they could have just disabled/deleted that group-email mailing list.
120 replies ( as of lunchtime ) out of 1.2 million recipients is a remarkably low ratio for a non-technology-focused organisation.<p>Looks like there are lot of sensible folk in the NHS, or else they haven't yet all had a chance to check their e-mails between shifts...
Reminds me of this very funny story shared on Metafilter...<p>(if the comment permalink doesn't work, please search for "Reply-All can get even more fun when")<p><a href="http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-THIS-LIST#2408665" rel="nofollow">http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...</a>
It's amusing how many people continue to suffer from a solved problem. Any email system that resembles Gmail in its most basic form, won't have any such problems. 100 people replying-all to the same email? Oh hey, they are all lumped together into a single thread which you can easily ignore. Don't want to see any more emails from that thread? Oh hey, you can just hit the mute button on that thread, and you will never see any more emails there.<p>It boggles my mind how many people and organizations continue to use outdated crappy systems when vastly superior alternatives have been publicly available for over a decade.
I just moved to the outlook webmail in a large-ish organization. It surprised me that Reply All is the default reply-button, and a regular reply requires expanding a drop down! The ui really encourages the mistake.
My wife works for the NHS so I had a quick look at her inbox (as it were).<p>Thoroughly disappointing. Normally when I see this happen it's at relatively IT-literate organisations. The NHS emails all seem to be single replies to the original email asking to be removed / saying it seems to be sent in error.<p>I say disappointing because I didn't see any threads spiralling off into back-and-forth between people asking others to stop replying or anyone trolling others.<p>Such a waste.
I once went to a crowed midnight movie showing of the 1950's "It Came From Outerspace". The crowd seemed quite intoxicated and so I missed the first 40 minutes of the movie's dialog because every few seconds someone would stand up and yell SHUT UP and then someone else would yell back from the other side of the theater NO YOU SHUT UP.<p>It was terrible and amusing at the same time.
Ah. This reminds me of a great story in Amazon of a conference room booking email gone wrong. The email was inadvertently sent to the entire company, so that employees in Japan, China, Scotland, France, etc. all knew of this fabled booking. At its peak over 280k emails were being delivered throughout the company.<p>Also good to remember: replying UNSUBSCRIBE to an email list is typically not how you go about it.
Pro tip to escape this kind of situation : reply to the last email but spoof a fake email address as sender. Now, for everybody who's gonna use the last email to reply (your email then) your email address doesn't appear anywhere.<p>You might need to repeat this process a few times since people don't always reply to your email, but it works pretty well.
I think the iOS "unsubscribe" banner could be adding to the chaos. Not sure about this exact situation, but I've been caught in mailing lists where people instinctually hit the unsubscribe prompt which just sends an email with text saying "unsubscribe", therefor blasting everyone in the thread and not actually unsubscribing them.
When I was in college e-mail was everything. Facebook was only just getting off the ground, so when an event was happening or a club was recruiting the best way to get the word out was to send an e-mail to the listserv, which then sent it to specific class years or to the whole campus.<p>Problem was this listserv wasn't moderated at all. Any club president or anyone else who wanted access could get it, and the messages weren't screened for content before being distributed to every e-mail address on the list.<p>One such club president wrote an e-mail to the ex of his current girl that began, "Me and Jessica fucked like rabbits..." and he accidentally included the listserv address for the entire campus on that e-mail. The guy was generally well known as an active student with great grades who didn't get in trouble, so when a catty lovers quarrel was made public to thousands of students and faculty by his own hand it was kinda entertaining.
Something like this seems to happen, and make the news, every couple years...<p>Is it not possible to configure their email server to disallow emails with over X recipients from sending?
I was once part of a ~20k person reply-all chain. After a while I sent an email to each person who sent yet another reply-all asking to be removed an individual email explaining how dumb they were, in the nicest, most professionally appropriate way possible. None of them replied to me.
Tangent: I found 1.4M to 1.7M employees for NHS on google. 64.1M people in the UK, 31.42M employed.<p>1.4M / 31.42M = 4.5% of the entire UK workforce works for NHS? Is this a normal distribution for a developed country?
This happened at Qualcomm once. I think it was an IT email too. It went out to most of the corp and what really started the issue was people's vacation/out-of-office auto-reply-all messages -- those really started magnifying problem. Then people started making it even worse by reply-all sending "remove me from this list!" etc. The most funny messages were the reply-all that said "Stop sending reply all to the whole list!" It lasted most of the day...
>> 120 replies so far — meaning that more than 140 million needless emails have been sent across the NHS's network today. As a result, they said, its email systems are running "very slow today."<p>Is this 1994? That isn't my definition of email hell. 100 useless emails in my inbox is a bad day, but it certainly isn't a hellish one. And 140 million emails shouldn't slow anything down. That;s a drop in the spam bucket for any organization the size of the NHS.
I received such a mail from Microsoft a few years back. It was something related to WP/W8 development with thousands or tens of thousands (IIRC) of email addresses in the "to" field, so probably all registered app devs. I tried to send a witty response, but my mail server (ironically on outlook.com) refused to do it.
It's a little odd that this has received media attention.<p>What I'd do: independently of the email, ask for a procedure to be sent out to create an email filter/rule. Wouldn't take more than 1-2 minutes to complete for each end user.
This is why you should access controls on configure large mail groups. I thought this was pretty standard at large organisations. A select few people can actually send to a given group, but anyone else will just receive a bounceback.
Email clients need a way to remove the "reply-all" button. That way, users are forced to manually enter the emails of people other than the sender, which would make them think about who actually needs to be copied.
It's amazing to me that Microsoft never fixed this issue with Exchange.<p>There are a few edge cases like this where users with no ill intent can do lots of damage. Strong procedural controls are really the only defense.
I work for a large organization and this happens once or twice a year. I find that when speaking with people, no one knows what BCC is for. Many of these would be avoided if people used BCC properly.
I assume all mails run over NHS controlled mailservers. Some administrator could just step up and kill/block the email thread, right? Shouldn't be that hard of a problem...
I was caught in 'reply-all' email hell, but not at such scale. It was with about 5000 users. It was hilarious actually, but I can imagine a lot of people will find this annoying.
You can tell they aren't very close to it a they refer to "the" NHS - there are actually four NHSs for different parts of the UK:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service</a>