We have one email list that reaches everybody. It is called All Staff, it holds about two thousand one hundred addresses, and until October anybody in the company could send to it, because nobody had ever asked who should.
On a Tuesday morning in October a new administrator at one of our Lincolnshire depots meant to send the Christmas rota to her depot's list. She typed "All" into the To line, picked the first suggestion, and pressed send. Within a few minutes somebody replied to everyone asking to be taken off. Then somebody else did. Then a manager replied to everyone telling people to stop replying to everyone, which is the reply that keeps every one of these going. In a little under an hour there were thirty five replies, each delivered to two thousand one hundred mailboxes, or a little over seventy thousand messages.
Nothing broke. What went was attention. Our service desk took about a hundred and sixty calls asking how to make it stop. And a payroll message about the December pay date, sent that morning to the same list, was buried so deep that the following week we answered over forty questions it had already answered.
Exchange Online has a protection built for exactly this. Once a thread sent to a large number of people collects enough reply alls, it blocks further replies to that thread for some hours. Its default threshold was set for lists larger than ours, and nobody had looked, because nobody owned the list. The setting can be brought down to cover lists of around a thousand people, and ours now is.
We changed the list as well. A message to All Staff from anyone other than six named people in communications and HR now waits for one of them to approve it. Company wide announcements go to a channel on our intranet, where a reply is seen by the person who posted, not by two thousand colleagues. And each depot list can only be used by people at that depot.
None of this was a technical failure. The mail system did what we had told it to, which was to let anyone speak to everyone and to let everyone answer. A list anyone can write to is a broadcast system, and every broadcast system needs somebody who decides what goes out on it.
– Serguey Shinder
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