THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

Replying (or not) to all

I support public floggings for people that inappropriately use reply. Do you? Please advise.

So the subject of my latest rant is the incorrect usage of reply to all. First of all, there is the person that uses reply to all when clearly a reply to all is not called for:

Email 1, to 1000 people: “License plate ABC-123 has left their lights on in the parking lot”
Email 2, replying to all: “Thanks for letting me know!”

Though there is some fault on the sender for sending out an email that could be replied to all in this fashion, instead of using something handy like BCC. When I worked at GE, reply to all was actually eliminated from their mail client to avoid dumb people replying to all and clogging up the mail server.

So that kind of usage is annoying. But it pales in comparison to its opposite, NOT replying to all when it is called for.

Example: I send an email to someone at school, asking for the time of a meeting that Carolyn and I need to go to. I copy Carolyn because she is a big girl and she has her own email. The response comes with the meeting time and it is just sent to me. GRRRRR!!! Now I have to forward the email on to Carolyn. Granted, it’s not like that takes THAT long to do, but it could have been averted had the person just replied to all, when it was CLEARLY called for!

This has been happening quite a lot lately and is quite irksome

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Dan Miller

3 responses to “Replying (or not) to all”

  2. Yeah, I agree, although I think there is a little bit of gray area when people reply to all because they want the rest of the people to read the email, and the receivers of said email just don’t care about the content. However, I support floggings for abuse. Our old landlord used to do this all the time when clearly both of us needed to know the info he would send one of us. It’s happened a lot with other people, too. It’s really not that difficult; just think to yourself, do the other people on this need to know what I’m sending?

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