When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?

Relevant Wikipedia page, since the article is completely lacking in historical context: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Email_storm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Email_storm</a><p>&quot;On 14 October 1997, a Microsoft employee noticed that they were on an as-yet unknown email distribution list &#x27;Bedlam DL3&#x27;, and emailed the list asking to be removed. This list contained approximately a quarter of the company&#x27;s employees, 13,000 email addresses. Other users replied to the list with similar requests and still others responded with pleas to stop replying to the list. A Microsoft employee estimates that 15 million emails were sent, using 195 GB of traffic.&quot;

Crusty though the software is, this is why list-hosts matter. Reply all is a terrible way to manage group communication by email. list-name@lists.domain.com is a pretty decent way to go about it. Emails that get distributed have a [list-name] tag prepended to the subject line for trivial filtering on the client side. You can set a large list to require moderation before distributing messages (except from a list of blessed senders). You can tell the software to set the Reply-To header to the sender&#x27;s email, rather than the list&#x27;s address, so that the &quot;Reply&quot; and &quot;Reply all&quot; buttons have the expected behavior. And there is self-service subscribe&#x2F;unsubscribe via a web interface (with permissions, of course).<p>My university operates such a server and it&#x27;s heavily used by everyone from department announcements to student organization coordination&#x2F;discussion.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;mailman&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;mailman&#x2F;</a>

This is purely anecdotal, but I am seeing far fewer replyallpocalypses than I did 10-15 years ago.<p>Has something changed, like better server or client email software? Or perhaps admins and users are more savvy about avoiding this kind of behavior?<p>(Maybe I&#x27;ve just been lucky to not have to deal with one of these for several years.)

Why was the answer in a PDF? I don&#x27;t understand. The increased casualness of the NYT lately has been bothering me.

When I want to publish some text on the open internet, should I put it all in a print-focussed file format instead of the HTML standard?<p>No.

Content of the ridiculous article in PDF<p>By Daniel Victor<p>O.K., here’s a little more context, for those of you who need it.<p>It begins when an innocuous email that you probably don’t need lands in your inbox (as it did mine on Thursday).<p>Soon someone inevitably replies (all): “Please remove me from this email chain.”<p>Then another: “Unsubscribe.”<p>Soon, dozens of people are replying­all, sending their fruitless requests to people who are equally annoyed. Notifications on your phone won’t stop buzzing.<p>This is known as the dreaded replyallpocalypse.<p>When you are in this situation, the logical, expert opinion is: Do not hit “reply all.”<p>You will only make things worse.<p>Another option: If you’re using Gmail, you could mute the conversation and go on with your day.<p>Otherwise, hunker down. We’re all in this together, and it’ll all be over soon.

I mostly don&#x27;t experience this, with one notable exception. My uni&#x27;s computer science department administrator has a mailing list for my entire class (~80 students). Whenever she sent out an email blast, it would appear to come from her email address, but for god knows what reason, the Reply-To address was set to the mailing list&#x27;s address.<p>So basically every time someone had something they needed to discuss with the dept admin after an email blast went out, they would end up sending their response to the entire CS class. No matter how many times it happened, there would always be that one person who hadn&#x27;t yet learned not to reply to the email blasts.

&quot;The New York Times’s internal email system contributed to this report.&quot;

For those who wonder (also mentioned in the article) in gmail there is a feature called &quot;mute&quot; exactly for this.

Couldn&#x27;t an &quot;unsubscribe&quot; functionality be written into an email server? You&#x27;d have to change the way mailboxes are stored. In particular, email threads and recipients lists would have to become explicit objects in a distributed database. Perhaps threads could be identified by a canonicalized version of the original recipients list, plus some other information?

At a former job someone sent a completely inane email asking about something personal to an HR email list or all people in the company, about 21,000 people.<p>Why does such an email list even exist? For some kind of HR emergency? Aren&#x27;t there other emergency messaging systems that could be more effective?

As mentioned by the pdf, &quot;Muting or ignoring conversations&quot; in Gmail: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;mail&#x2F;answer&#x2F;47787?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;mail&#x2F;answer&#x2F;47787?hl=en</a>

My employer just issued written notices to people sending mails to &quot;Territory All&quot; type addresses without good reason. I mean it asks you 3 fk&#x27;in times &quot;Are you sure???&quot;...

Like most article titles that end in a question mark, the answer is no.

Should I reply all and tell them not-to reply all?<p>Still NO.

they say brevity is wit, and the NYT does not disappoint