[Techtalk] The Candle Lighting email and an email shutdown

[Akkana]

Jennifer S. Davis writes:
> well, that would have been all fine and good had she kept her
> opinion to herself, but instead she hit the reply to all button.  Of
> course that started a debate that involved the whole bloody department and
> well crashed our system.  When the Info Managaement people got involved
> asking people to stop forwarding the message, people started forwarding
> the message to everyone telling everyone else to stop.
> 
> Basically, I was just wanted to share a story that would be funny if the
> subject matter wasn't so serious and I was wondering if anyone else
> experienced this in ther offices.

Oh, yes!  Even in major computer companies where you'd think people
would know better.  The current company where I work -- I won't
mention the name, but one of our products is a mail program, and
email is very much part of the corporate culture -- gets these
mail storms a couple times a year, where people reply-all to a 
list that goes to the whole company, and after a while people
start using reply-all to say "Don't use reply-all", and other
people reply-all to say "You're just making it worse", and then
people start doing reply-all to say "take me off this list".
Though I've never seen it actually crash a system (was this
an NT server? :-)

It's not just non-techies, either.  I've seen supposedly experienced
engineers contribute to these mail storms.  I'm somewhat tolerant of
newbies doing things like this, but I just don't understand how
someone can work in the industry for years and yet not know the
difference between reply and reply-all, especially when reply is
the default function in their mailer and they have to do something
special to do a reply-all.

-- 
	...Akkana       http://www.shallowsky.com