Ok, the title is overly dramatic, but I did see a company encounter an email storm this week which was…well, laughable.  This is a large company with thousands of employees.  One gentleman sent out an email about a specific account with a Word attachment.  What he didn’t know was that one of his distribution lists was wrong – it included everyone in the company.

One person on his list replied to all about printing the document.  That email started the storm.  Person after person started replying to all to remove them from the email list.

It gets better, the original author then sent out another email that simply stated “please reply if you received this email.”  Now it was a tsunami.  People started replying to all to the point where it overburdened the email servers and the entire company email was delayed 4-6 hours.  Of course this all happened in the morning so that email was effectively lost for the day.

Brutal.  One lesson here is to be judicious in your use of reply to all!

Comments(0)