this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
125 points (91.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35868 readers
2910 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Why not just have an easy button that you can click saying Do Not Allow Reply All?

I know that there are some ways you can limit reply-all availability, like in the URL linked here. But there's a note: If recipients open this email in other mail applications except Microsoft Outlook, such as opening on web page via web mailbox, they can reply all this email.

I'm semi-tech savvy but I'm no programmer. It feels like it should be easy to do, so either I'm totally wrong or email services are really missing out on a great thing they could do.

top 39 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world 34 points 5 hours ago

The solution is if you're sending a mass email that shouldn't be replied to you use BCC. So it's really the sender's fault

Outlook does give a warning now if you're sending to a distro list

[–] bitchkat@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago
[–] swordgeek@lemmy.ca 58 points 8 hours ago

Here's my snarky take on it:

Because it's not the job of the mail client to decide what parts of the protocol should be hidden from stupid users.

[–] donuts@lemmy.world 72 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

Step 1: draft an email to yourself

Step 2: put all recipients in the BCC

Step 3: now "reply all" does jack shit

[–] Boozilla@lemmy.world 19 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I use BCC semi-frequently at work because it prevents all kinds of (mostly unintentional) annoyances from my coworkers. Mostly with automated emails related to reports and/or our case management system. BCC is your best friend when used selectively.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 4 points 7 hours ago

Just don't use it for mass mailing external addresses. That'll get you on a blacklist faster than you'd think.

[–] NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 4 hours ago

I just get users messaging me to ask “is this spam?” since there’s no one in the To: section or they weren’t in the CC or To section.

But I still do it to avoid this type of crap.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 38 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

As the other commentors have said, this isn't a problem with email services, it's a problem with email users. If you put all the addresses in the "To:" or "CC:" boxes, its because you want someone to Reply All. If you want to prevent that, put all the recipients in the BCC box.

Its a good idea, but fortunately someone already solved it a good while back. Now we just need a PSA to teach people to stop cramming everyone in the wrong box.

[–] johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world 8 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

It is slightly the fault of the email clients for the sender that often don't show BCC by default. It probably would be reasonable for email clients to put a warning up if people are sending to a large number of people without using BCC.

[–] NutinButNet@hilariouschaos.com 3 points 4 hours ago

Also their fault because a lot of them have had the Reply All button first before Reply. Outlook, at least, seems to be changing this in some ways.

But putting it first is guaranteeing users will just click the first “reply” and keep writing.

[–] SatyrSack@feddit.org 7 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

People in my organization do this, and it's great. The only downside to that is when you want recipients to know exactly who else the email was sent to. Not super common, in my experience, but it does occur.

[–] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

When I do bcc to a big list, I describe the distribution in the email header. Like "To: all users of the xxx application" or "To: All Engineering employees at the yyy site."

[–] fitgse@sh.itjust.works 20 points 8 hours ago

My wife and I were doing big renovations on our home and were dealing with lots of contractors. I would email them and include my wife’s email. Yet every contractor failed to press reply all when responding so my wife was constantly left out of the loop

It turns out people just don’t care to think about or understand basic technology.

This stuff really needs to be taught in school (like how we used to have typing and business communication classes)

[–] superkret@feddit.org 24 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

When your recipient can "reply all", that means you've exposed every recipient's email address to all recipients.
At that point, "reply all" is just a convenience, without it they could just copy-paste the email addresses manually.

If you want to suppress that, don't show everyone the email address of everyone else.
For internal mail, you can use BCC. For external, use a mailer service.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 7 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

I worked for a startup that got bought by Oracle. Five whole years without a reply-all storm, but the first week we had hundreds of people reply all and it was hilarious watching the admins try and fail to convince people to stop replying all.

[–] bitchkat@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

The correct response is to reply all when people start bitching. I can usually throw in an "unsubcribe" request in a separate email.

[–] purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 2 points 3 hours ago

I've pointed out that this issue could arrise so many times to companies with the all staff email. Every time they push back on wanting to define limited senders, "we don't think it's an issue/no one would do that!" Until someone sends an inappropriate email to the whole company, then it's suddenly IT's fault.

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

the admins should not be the ones convincing. Its the managers who have to wrangle behavior like that.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Most of the people replying-all were managers

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

ah but you see even managers have mangers. I mean if the behavior goes all the way to ceo then its just company culture at that point.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

its just company culture at that point

Considering it was Oracle I'd go with this

[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Wonder what the back end software is there. With Exchange reply-all storms are a thing of the past. I don’t have to convince anyone of anything to stop a reply all storm. Takes 2 minutes of setting up a transport rule. But the admin needs to be experienced enough to know that.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 5 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

It was Oracle so they probably have a terrible internal email server that will have reply-all storm protection in a year or two.

I was working with the customer service software devs to migrate my team from Salesforce's Desk.com (because Oracle hates Salesforce) and they said it would take 18 months to make a dropdown that you could type in and select a macro for a ticket. Eventually they gave up.

[–] bitchkat@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

I just talked to an oracle employee. They are using outlook/exchange/teams now and have moved on from Beehive.

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

Is there any other way to describe Lotus?

Enough said. You have my sympathy.

[–] IMNOTCRAZYINSTITUTION@lemmy.world 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

at my last job, someone from corporate sent out a mass email to literally everyone in the company (thousands of people) without using BCC and that chain ended up lasting for weeks before someone higher up eventually said that further reply alls will be punished lmao

[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

That means your mail admins sucked at their job.

[–] IMNOTCRAZYINSTITUTION@lemmy.world 9 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

oh believe me, everyone working at that company's corporate office sucked at their job, including me lmao. every hour was amateur hour!

every hour was amateur hour!

lol, I am stealing this!

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 3 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

you think thats bad. group texts automatically send to all. It doesn't even default to just replying to the last person to send to you.

[–] bitchkat@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

This is correct. Any message sent to a group, should reply to the group by default.

[–] Deconceptualist@lemm.ee 2 points 4 hours ago

Yeah for real, fuck SMS protocol for omitting basic quality of life features developed decades prior.

[–] nonailsleft@lemm.ee -2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

There's a special hell for everyone sharing tips to stop people from reply all'ing

[–] Deconceptualist@lemm.ee 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Why? BCC is the solution and has been part of email since at least 1990. I'm not condoning a dogpile on OP, but this is a solved problem.

[–] jumjummy@lemmy.world 1 points 4 minutes ago

Better than BCC is using a Distribution List with restrictions on who can send to it. Helps see who else got the email, without blowing up with reply-all emails. Obviously this only works in a corporate environment where distribution lists can be restricted.

[–] NarrativeBear@lemmy.world 1 points 20 minutes ago

This is the answer, bbc is the solution.

To get less "tech inclined" people to use the bbc feature is another story.

Sending a email to the whole office from HR, bbc all recipients. Then recipients can only reply to HR, and not 600 plus staff members, into a email chain that last all day asking people to stop replying all, while replying all at the same time.

[–] EtherWhack@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

Is this from that one about that lunch thing where people ignored when told to only reply to that one guy. It gave me a bit of enjoyment this week.

[–] femtech@midwest.social 2 points 8 hours ago

They can, and do give the option for Enterprise support but not public/personal accounts. You will need to bcc if you don't want others replying.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/preventing-reply-all-on-internal-e-mail-chain/5f0344fd-1fed-43c7-88e7-41010e085c2a