Working for a large corporation, invariably someone screws up an e-mail once every couple of months and sends it to the wrong e-mail distribution group, which causes 1000s of people to receive the e-mail in error. The resulting responses are always hilarious.
In today's episode, a manager sends an innocuous e-mail reminding his team to complete their mandated training on time. Unfortunately for him, someone added a group to one of his groups that contains numerous people who are not related to his team in any way.
First come the handful of responses from people who can't figure out how to just reply to the sender and hit reply all. Then come the people who reply to all those first few responders to say "Me too!". Next come the gentle reminders from a few folks to say "Please don't reply all" - while replying all. Then the numerous indignant responses pleading people to not reply all, by replying all to those that replied all.
The comedy grows from there until mercifully someone in technology puts an end to it. Still waiting for that...
Never fail, with a big enough group I can get these e-mails for 8 hours straight, in repetition - 'don't reply all!' followed by 'don't reply to all when saying don't reply all!' (copied to all, of course).
My all time favorite comes from a smaller company, though - which for some reason had an 'All@' e-mail distribution list. It was also the first address in the address book for all users, so it was commonplace for users picking a contact from the address book to accidentally include it in an e-mail.
Needless to say, we all learned more about Andrea's yeast infection than we cared to that day.
I'm saying that the first 50 replies that say don't reply all should probably suffice.
And people reply all with "unsubscribe"
or like you said "please don't reply to all" and then it seems like it died down and then the West Coast gets to the office and it starts again.
and then the guy who was in customer meetings all day finally checks his email and breathes more life into it, and then it goes global because Europe maybe had gone for the day and they get involved.
if there was a way I could anonymously start one of those monthly I would.
And people reply all with "unsubscribe"
or like you said "please don't reply to all" and then it seems like it died down and then the West Coast gets to the office and it starts again.
and then the guy who was in customer meetings all day finally checks his email and breathes more life into it, and then it goes global because Europe maybe had gone for the day and they get involved.
if there was a way I could anonymously start one of those monthly I would.
I wish I could anonymously reply to some of the responders, that would be much more fun.
That policy was changed two days later...
he said I could input any valid email address and send an email to anyone I wanted from that email address.
So I said let me try it. I had a brand new boss I hated so I sent him an email from jack.welch@ge.com and said
"Sorry XXX but due to being such an asshole we're going to have to let you go.
You have until the end of the day to gather your things."
Jack Welch
CEO
it worked (the email). I think he reported the incident to HR, but never knew who it was from.
Not that that helps you reply to these morons in your company, but there are ways to send anonymous emails.
"Why am I receiving this"
"take me off this email"
"you sent to the wrong person".
Either these people are pretty dumb or they are just trolling the company.
#reutersreplyallgate - ( New Window )
That is when MCI set the rule that anyone gets only 1 OOO message from a specific person
But I do remember back in the earlier days of email, one guy sent to the group an email complementing a female coworker's outfit after a meeting instead of to his buddy. The kind of fuck-up let's you sit back and feel better about the direction your life in going in
I don't get reply all emails. I have people that send an email out to 6 or 7 distribution list (could be a total of 200 people) hoping to get a response from the proper support group. When someone or team responds, they continue to have the email back and forth including the 7 distribution lists and people who could care less about the issue. I put on a "delete me" rule and I'm off
My pet peeve is group texts. Every time you send a group text an angel losses it's wings.
The exec guy was cool about it - he replied all and made light of email messages and copying everyone. It was well done and the dude got to keep his job. Still though. Ouch.
The exec guy was cool about it - he replied all and made light of email messages and copying everyone. It was well done and the dude got to keep his job. Still though. Ouch.
Outlook recall is almost like Microsoft trolling emailers. You fucked up. You realized your fuck up, how can you possibly make it worse? recall the message which does nothing other than make sure people who might have ignored the message immediately after seeing your name or the subject or the first line of text, will now make sure and read the whole thing (and maybe even tell their friends about it) to see what dumpster fire you created.