Next headline: “Trump administration being blocked by every ISP for spammy behaviour”
Reply all. Take me off this email chain.
I was working at a large company, and an external party that pretty much everyone in the industry was working with, sent out a regular blast email to all its users about the industry. Unfortunately, they CC’d everyone. What ensued was an infinite loop of out-of-office replies being sent to everyone. I came back from lunch and I had over 500 emails in my inbox, and they kept coming. IT had to step in to put an end to it. Pretty funny to watch in real time.
I think we auto block emails with more than 50 recipients. The only exception I think is the union who are allowed to email as many people as they like since they complained.
Reply all: Unsubscribe
I was working for an international company that was very modular.
At a large event, they sent out an update to all attendees. Due to the way the internal mailing list worked, replies were sent to everyone on the list.
All the non-english language mailboxes were set up with an automatic reply that detects the language and replies along the lines of “we speak French, if you need to contact us in English, please contact…”.The event update was in English.
The mail system was down for about an hour.
After the initial rush, I’m pretty sure there were also “we speak French, if you need to contact us in Spanish, please contact…”
Yeah, the IT folks in charge of that are doing so at gunpoint. Had someone do that at a giant size corp and the chain of events goes like this.
Email to all gets sent
A few people wonder why they are getting messages not related to their role and reply all to be taken off a list.
Those reply-all get replicated to the same few hundred thousand boxes causing stress on the system.
You well meaning college sends out a reminder via reply-all that you shouldn’t reply-all.
Because those few transactions created somewhere in the order of 2-3 million emails in a short time the servers have a backed up que to chew through causing some people to get things out of order, so maybe they get a ‘take me off the list’ after the fist ‘stop replying all’, now this person decides to help reinforce the ‘stop replying all’ with their own message of the same.
Rinse and repeat until the servers are entirely unable to operate and you need to find a way to flush the cache.
BONUS: Because this is the federal government you can bet that several entities they have contracts with would have automatic relays to distribute incoming messages to required teams for quick responses, so there’s a good chance the effect bleeds into private businesses too because Donnie & Musky will demand that ALL means everyone in the federal contacts list.
