Media and communication

Reply to all

Every large organisation has its version of the story. At the regional tax office in Dunleigh, it began on a Monday morning, when a junior administrator meant to send a note about a broken printer to her own team of six and instead sent it to all 4,300 staff. Within minutes the replies began to arrive, most of them asking to be removed from the list – and every one of them, inevitably, sent to everyone. By lunchtime the email system had slowed to a crawl. The message that went out to staff the following day was carefully worded [1] as not to embarrass the administrator, who had, after all, simply chosen the wrong name from a drop-down list. Rather than discipline anyone, the office quietly removed the 'reply all' button from messages sent to large distribution lists, a change that almost nobody noticed until someone suggested bringing it back.