No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world SLVRDRGN @lemmy.world 7d ago

Is there an obvious technical reason why the major email services (Outlook, gmail, etc) can't seem to limit recipients from Replying-All?

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.

55 comments

Step 1: draft an email to yourself

Step 2: put all recipients in the BCC

Step 3: now "reply all" does jack shit
- 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.
  
  Just don't use it for mass mailing external addresses. That'll get you on a blacklist faster than you'd think.
  
  My favorite thing is when I notice the chain is emailing people who don’t need to see it and Reply All after moving them to BCC (I add a note saying “moved X to BCC” for transparency).
  
  People love me :-)
- 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.
  
  You can put in the first line of your message body:
  
  <group of people> in bcc
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
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.
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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  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."
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)
- I kind of think that contractors not being well versed in digital things is to be expected.
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.
The way to do this is to use a mailing list that only allows a limited number of people to send emails to it. You could do this automatically when someone clicked a “Prohibit Reply All” button, but such a feature is unnecessary if you use mailing lists configured that way by default.
- That basically means sending the same email over and over but with one recipient per email
  
  That isn’t what it means at all.
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
- That means your mail admins sucked at their job.
  
  oh believe me, everyone working at that company's corporate office sucked at their job, including me lmao. every hour was amateur hour!
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.
- 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.
- the admins should not be the ones convincing. Its the managers who have to wrangle behavior like that.
  
  Most of the people replying-all were managers
- 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.
  
  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.
- The correct response is to reply all when people start bitching. I can usually throw in an "unsubcribe" request in a separate email.
At my work we have something in place that prevents somebody from sending to more than 50 recipients but we control our own mail servers and know how many people are in the largest department

Basically, things like this exist but aren't necessarily intuitive to set up and defaults would require contextual knowledge
!oldpeoplefacebook@reddthat.com
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.
- This is correct. Any message sent to a group, should reply to the group by default.
- Yeah for real, fuck SMS protocol for omitting basic quality of life features developed decades prior.
- We brought on a man in his mid 50s. He knows the work and doesn't complain about long hard hours. The problem is he can barely work his iPhone let alone a laptop. I'm just a team lead so I don't need to deal with his computer shit really, but I learned quickly that I couldn't put him on group texts. He cannot tell the difference between a group text and a regular text.
  
  "Don't know why you're asking me"
  
  "You should talk to X about that"
  
  "X" was in the group text as was his boss. After that I just took him off the group texts for the rest of the project and sent him need to know info separately.
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
- Yeah, I used to manage a Google account for a school district. I was able to disable the reply all for certain groups. My solution was to disable it for all groups except for one that I specifically created to allow it. The only members of that group had to be allowed in through a vote of our little tech committee which consisted of me and various upper level admins.
  
  It worked quite well and it was hilarious listening to the students bitch that I had locked them out of one of the pranks they wanted to do.
Why?
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.
There's a special hell for everyone sharing tips to stop people from reply all'ing
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.

55 comments