For those who wonder (also mentioned in the article) in gmail there is a feature called "mute" exactly for this.
When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
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Re: When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
#22Crusty though the software is, this is why list-hosts matter. Reply all is a terrible way to manage group communication by email. list-name@lists.domain.com is a pretty decent way to go about it. Emails that get distributed have a [list-name] tag prepended to the subject line for trivial filtering on the client side. You can set a large list to require moderation before distributing messages (except from a list of blessed senders). You can tell the software to set the Reply-To header to the sender's email, rather than the list's address, so that the "Reply" and "Reply all" buttons have the expected behavior. And there is self-service subscribe/unsubscribe via a web interface (with permissions, of course).
My university operates such a server and it's heavily used by everyone from department announcements to student organization coordination/discussion.
Re: When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
#23Couldn't an "unsubscribe" functionality be written into an email server? You'd have to change the way mailboxes are stored. In particular, email threads and recipients lists would have to become explicit objects in a distributed database. Perhaps threads could be identified by a canonicalized version of the original recipients list, plus some other information?
Re: When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
#24Relevant Wikipedia page, since the article is completely lacking in historical context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm "On 14 October 1997, a Microsoft employee noticed that they were on an as-yet unknown email distribution list 'Bedlam DL3', and emailed the list asking to be removed. This list contained approximately a quarter of the company's employees, 13,000 email addresses. Other users replied to the…
This happened a few times at the bank I worked at for almost a decade.
You could count on the technologists to not throw gas on the fire by replying (everyone'd heard of Bedlam DL3), but once non-technical sales, trading and ops were on the list, all bets were off.
Re: When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
#25Why was the answer in a PDF? I don't understand. The increased casualness of the NYT lately has been bothering me.
My best guess: The article is about an online faux pas, and hyperlinking to a PDF when an HTML page would be perfectly sufficient is a self-aware nod to another online faux pas. (Fellow HN user oneeyedpigeon points out this faux pas in their comment.)
My seventh-best guess: The NYTimes' CMS lacks support for actual footnotes, so linking to another page is the next best thing. But since the footnote doesn't make complete sense unless you've come from the main article, the web editors didn't want the other page to be easily discoverable. Problem is, the CMS automatically makes any article styled as a regular article SEO-friendly, so they decided to work around that by putting the text into a less-SEO-friendly PDF.
Re: When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
#26Couldn't an "unsubscribe" functionality be written into an email server? You'd have to change the way mailboxes are stored. In particular, email threads and recipients lists would have to become explicit objects in a distributed database. Perhaps threads could be identified by a canonicalized version of the original recipients list, plus some other information?
Or you could just reply to the list itself with the word 'remove' in the subject (doesn't work for all list servers). That's how most servers handled subscriptions back in the days and probably still is now.
Re: When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
#27Relevant Wikipedia page, since the article is completely lacking in historical context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm "On 14 October 1997, a Microsoft employee noticed that they were on an as-yet unknown email distribution list 'Bedlam DL3', and emailed the list asking to be removed. This list contained approximately a quarter of the company's employees, 13,000 email addresses. Other users replied to the…
The bananas in the break room incident and most recently Reuters.
edit: Atos that's a new one. But no bananas? I'm disappointed.
The "free bananas in the kitchen" story. http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...
Re: When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
#28Content of the ridiculous article in PDF
By Daniel Victor
O.K., here’s a little more context, for those of you who need it.
It begins when an innocuous email that you probably don’t need lands in your inbox (as it did mine on Thursday).
Soon someone inevitably replies (all): “Please remove me from this email chain.”
Then another: “Unsubscribe.”
Soon, dozens of people are replyingall, sending their fruitless requests to people who are equally annoyed. Notifications on your phone won’t stop buzzing.
This is known as the dreaded replyallpocalypse.
When you are in this situation, the logical, expert opinion is: Do not hit “reply all.”
You will only make things worse.
Another option: If you’re using Gmail, you could mute the conversation and go on with your day.
Otherwise, hunker down. We’re all in this together, and it’ll all be over soon.
Re: When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
#29I mostly don't experience this, with one notable exception. My uni's computer science department administrator has a mailing list for my entire class (~80 students). Whenever she sent out an email blast, it would appear to come from her email address, but for god knows what reason, the Reply-To address was set to the mailing list's address.
So basically every time someone had something they needed to discuss with the dept admin after an email blast went out, they would end up sending their response to the entire CS class. No matter how many times it happened, there would always be that one person who hadn't yet learned not to reply to the email blasts.
Re: When I’m Mistakenly on an Email Chain, Should I Reply All Asking to Be Removed?
#30Relevant Wikipedia page, since the article is completely lacking in historical context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm "On 14 October 1997, a Microsoft employee noticed that they were on an as-yet unknown email distribution list 'Bedlam DL3', and emailed the list asking to be removed. This list contained approximately a quarter of the company's employees, 13,000 email addresses. Other users replied to the…
One time someone figured out you could send an email to everyone in the university network with one command as everyone was in a Gmail group. That person started an email chain that lasted a few months.