1. original sensible email like "hey guys, I have some honey/walnuts/fruit/spirits from my hometown if anyone wants to try/buy"
2. sensible replies start rolling in, but which were accidentally sent to all
3. some jokers/trolls send memes in response (also reply all)
4. the whining begins, people reply-all asking everyone to stop spamming them
5. the memers reply (sometimes with more memes) that it is the optional "social" list that's for this sort of nonserious/fun stuff.
6. some helpful problem-solvers weigh in, sending reply-all instructions (often including MS Paint'd diagrams) on how to unsubscribe from the list or apply an outlook filter
7. finally the "can everyone just stop replying to this though?" emails start, also reply-all (and apparently oblivious to the contradiction/irony of their own reply-all) and everyone participating starts to realise it should be ignored...
Once you recognise the pattern it becomes pretty enjoyable identifying which stage of this month's "Emailgate" you're currently at - the whole thing can around to 45-60 mins to play out.
This is especially compounded when it's a list that never has anything you want on it anyway - say it's some sort of distro that is usually used for the corporate newsletter.
Hilarious to watch I must say.
However, it might not work any more, as people are no longer familiar with Majordomo mailing lists.
The mail servers slowed to a crawl. We had thousands of emails. It began at 9am GMT. Eventually after about 3 or so hours everything calmed down and we could send mail again, albeit with a large delay.
Around 12:30 the US workers began coming in, openend outlook and saw all the emails. And instead of scrolling down they sent an email, reply all "could you remove me from this list". Again people replied "stop replying all" on reply all. We were up and running again! Mail was down for the rest of the day.
The next day some people who were off the day before came in and there was again a brief storm, but sadly this one only lasted around 30 minutes.
One of the biggest banks. Lasted a whole day. We christened it "moron storm".
One can right click and then Ignore the thread, but presumably nobody is aware of this or we wouldn't be having this conversation.
But evidence points to the contrary; to wit, they have yet to implement S/MIME signed email in anything but an incredibly useless way: the email is not displayed, but a link says "This is not supported in the current view, please click here", and when you click it a popup (Yes! A real 1997 era popup! That your browser will complain about and induces even more clicks! OWA loves them!) appears that displays the actual message but fails to verify the signature.
- US Department of Defense
- The Chinese Army
- Walmart
- McDonalds
- The NHS
And The NHS's staff are all far more likely to actually have to use a computer and email in their day-to-day work than most of those Walmart and McDonalds employees.
The RCC does not provide a world- or even countrywide emailing system for clergy people, maybe except the Vatican. I did a little gig for a church group once, chances are high that most of them are technically illiterate and are happy if some dude like me throws 'em a Wordpress template and a (back in the days) free Google Apps mail account.
Indian Railways is another large employer with unique technology problems.
[1]http://www.tldm.org/News11/DevastatingDeclineReligiousOrders...
Yet nobody can be found in that entire throng who can command an e-mail server into putting a swift end to a runaway thread.
[0] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...
[Yes, really] [No]"
With the latter option being focused by default and emphasized?
Yes, doing that is tricky deployment-wise with open protocols, but isn't the whole point of solutions like Exchange to enable system-wide shortcuts like that?
With an open solution the next best option is probably to have the mail server send a confirmation request email back to the user with a link to click if they really wanted to send it, instructions on how to reply with a confirmation etc.
I was the PM who owned MailTips when it was created/introduced, and our research at the time showed it would be effective for preventing reply-all storms.
Implementing this is, of course, harder than you think. The size of groups has to be calculated nightly and distributed to every server, since groups can be nested (and have duplicate recipients).
1/4 of 55,000 = 13,0000.
That seems to have been where the writer got confused.
It boggles my mind how many people and organizations continue to use outdated crappy systems when vastly superior alternatives have been publicly available for over a decade.
Is it not possible to configure their email server to disallow emails with over X recipients from sending?
I would expect the server to refuse to send to "all@nhs.gov.uk" unless the sender is on some sort of pre-approved list.
The terms "National Health Service" or "NHS" are also used to refer to the four systems collectively.
Looks like there are lot of sensible folk in the NHS, or else they haven't yet all had a chance to check their e-mails between shifts...
Another possibility is that dealing with messages that have 1.2 million recipients so overloads the system that it it has only been able to deliver 120 of them so far.
To help avoid this situation, when sending emails to a large number of people (or a list that goes to a large number of people), if you know that responses should not go to that same set of people, use BCC.
The NHS resolved the issue by killing the offending DL reasonably quickly, which would stop further replies from being generated. This is also the reason why only about a hundred folks (out of a million) replied-all to the message.
It took about 2 months before the storm finally ended.
It became comical how many responders to the email chastised the original sender for "HIPAA violations" using Reply-All thereby inadvertently committing the same infraction themselves because the original email was included at the bottom of the reply.
Also, several times, after 2-3 days of quiet, someone would come back from vacation and reply-all with "I think you sent this to the wrong person", thereby starting the storm all over again.
The company of the original sender seemed powerless to stop it, but I always wondered if they could have just disabled/deleted that group-email mailing list.
You might need to repeat this process a few times since people don't always reply to your email, but it works pretty well.
You're suggesting adding millions of extra emails to the system here. I think the best thing to do is wait, or create a rule based on the subject line.
But this is a really exceptionnel situation, while being trapped in a reply-to-all loop is not that uncommon.
EDIT: Maybe it's a mailing list so there's just one address.
1.4M / 31.42M = 4.5% of the entire UK workforce works for NHS? Is this a normal distribution for a developed country?
The UK does have a private healthcare sector, although smaller than the NHS.
We spend about 7% of GDP on the NHS. So it's about right that number.
Also good to remember: replying UNSUBSCRIBE to an email list is typically not how you go about it.
So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.
It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...
...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:
(if the comment permalink doesn't work, please search for "Reply-All can get even more fun when")
http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...
Thoroughly disappointing. Normally when I see this happen it's at relatively IT-literate organisations. The NHS emails all seem to be single replies to the original email asking to be removed / saying it seems to be sent in error.
I say disappointing because I didn't see any threads spiralling off into back-and-forth between people asking others to stop replying or anyone trolling others.
Such a waste.
It was terrible and amusing at the same time.
Problem was this listserv wasn't moderated at all. Any club president or anyone else who wanted access could get it, and the messages weren't screened for content before being distributed to every e-mail address on the list.
One such club president wrote an e-mail to the ex of his current girl that began, "Me and Jessica fucked like rabbits..." and he accidentally included the listserv address for the entire campus on that e-mail. The guy was generally well known as an active student with great grades who didn't get in trouble, so when a catty lovers quarrel was made public to thousands of students and faculty by his own hand it was kinda entertaining.
Is this 1994? That isn't my definition of email hell. 100 useless emails in my inbox is a bad day, but it certainly isn't a hellish one. And 140 million emails shouldn't slow anything down. That;s a drop in the spam bucket for any organization the size of the NHS.
What I'd do: independently of the email, ask for a procedure to be sent out to create an email filter/rule. Wouldn't take more than 1-2 minutes to complete for each end user.
There are a few edge cases like this where users with no ill intent can do lots of damage. Strong procedural controls are really the only defense.
