Promotion for an employee to a senior position, announced to the company via email.
Have gotten over a dozen 'Congrats' emails in response.

I've caught most of the culprits of this in the past, and informed them to use BCC when sending emails to all employees, but some still slip through.

Luckily, we're a relatively small company (400-ish) so it'll taper off quickly.

Sadly employees abuse email all the time.

*Like using email to share files rather than using their central file server.

*Or using the email system to deliver their scans from the corp. MFP (printer/scanner) rather than have the machine auto save to a file server or their machine.

*Or never deleting ANY file or worse deleting and keeping in their deleted folder - never deleting or never clearing out the junk folder.

Sorry but I digress ... and do agree with you.

On your 2nd point, we do rely fairly heavily on scan to email rather than scan to folder.

Something with out setup just doesn't jive with commercial MFPs & scan to server.

We do allow for a healthy size allowance for attachments, internally. But that's mostly to allow for a few larger automated reports to pass through.

I on occasion catch someone's inbox during remote assistance & see >10k emails
My inbox is my to-do box, so I try to keep it pared down. Currently have 4 emails in my inbox, and those are long-term reference items.

But, similarly, I digress.

Luckily, from the OP, the mass reply-all emails tapered off after about an hour. Most non-computer users don't tend to reply from their phones.

I was going to relate how it was at an old company of mine thinking yours wasn't business related. You'd think someone would have figured out by now how to send out company-wide emails.

There's sometimes a need to keep everyone in CC like with reports to a specific group.

But there are obvious things where BCC is applicable. I also put it on the people replying to ALL. There's a separate button for "reply (to the sender)" and "reply to all." I find it funny when people reply all to say, "Please take me off this distribution list." Then several others reply to all to also want to be taken off the distribution list.

For promotion announcements, I do think you can expect a few "reply alls" as a way of group celebration; but I would expect that from the person's peers or seniors. People below doing that runs the risk of being seen as just sucking up.

I finally brought that nonsense to a screeching halt by putting rules in the mail server that rejected emails to "all" except from a very few select employees: Executives, HR, and I.T. Dept. personnel.

Sort of related...

About 20 years ago, right before Christmas, an unhappy employee sent out a company-wide email enumerating his reasons for being unhappy with the company. (Global company with about 3000 employees.)

He closed with a statement something like "effective immediately, I quit."

The mail admin tried to recall the message, but lots of people read it before the recall.

Burning bridges and all that...

/thread drift.

I send most of my larger group emails as BCC with a note at the top that it is being sent BCC and to whom so as to avoid the inevitable reply chain.

Use BCC all the time, company for obvious reasons and personal

We all have that one friend who has to reply all, always, wanting everyone to see his comments and will reply to anyone's response with "reply all" on anything to just engage.

Everyone caught on, now he's BBC only when included. Does the same shit with Texts.

A couple "Tales From The Front." Only marginally related, but still Stupid End-User Email Stunts.

One day something on one of my systems raised its electronic hand and said "Uh, boss? Something you need to look at."

Looked, and found the one of the mail servers was swamped with out-going emails. "What the...?!?!" Saw what was remaining in queue to be delivered, said "Holy crap!" and quickly whipped-up a one-line shell script to whack everything remaining in the outgoing queue.

Hunted-down the sales droid responsible. (Not at all to my surprise: One of my "problem children.") "Excuse me, but just what the hell did you think you were doing?" He explained. "Did all these customers and sales contacts request this kind of thing from us?" No, but... "Do you understand the concept of ``spam?``" Well, yeah, but this wasn't spam because... "No, dude, that is exactly what spam is, and, if this gets us landed on an Internet email blacklist, I'll play hell getting us removed, if I even can get us removed. Never, ever even think about pulling such a stunt again."

Went and appraised his manager of what he'd done. He was not amused. (The vast majority of my internal customers knew better than to do such things, and why.)

Then there was the time one of my vendors did the same thing, only using one gigantic "To:" line. Saw that, thought "Oh, this is gonna be good" and, sure enough, the "Reply All"s started flooding in. Many of them very humorous, some really, really annoyed. I finally had to put a rule in the mail server to reject anything with that "Subject:" in the mail headers to make it stop.

Called my sales rep. at said company and told her what her colleague had done. At first she didn't get it. I explained the fallout. She was not amused, either.

Sometimes good amusement though. Like the time our COO and Compliance officer sent an email to entire company, and one smart lady in Midland, TX thought it was a good idea to reply with "Who are you and why am I getting this?"

His reply; "Because my name is on the corporate formation documents and because you work here. For now."

 
For a company, there should be a mailing list server with at least one list: all employees.

quote:

Originally posted by henryaz:
 
For a company, there should be a mailing list server with at least one list: all employees.

We do have that, which is the crux of the OP.
An email was sent to this group, and tons of Reply All emails of 'congrats' to All Employees.
BCC would've alleviated that & only the send, and maybe the promoted employee as a CC would've gotten the replies.

quote:

Originally posted by P250UA5:

quote:

Originally posted by henryaz:
For a company, there should be a mailing list server with at least one list: all employees.

We do have that, which is the crux of the OP.
An email was sent to this group, and tons of Reply All emails of 'congrats' to All Employees.
BCC would've alleviated that & only the send, and maybe the promoted employee as a CC would've gotten the replies.

That's an abuse of the Bcc field. The correct way to fix such a problem is for the sender to set "Reply-to:"

To: all@example.com
From: whomever@example.com
Reply-to: whomever@example.com
Subject: Congratulations To John Doe On His Promotion!

If <whomever> doesn't want replies, "Reply-to:" should be set to "nobody@example.com" (which, in properly-run mail systems, sends email to the bit bucket).

But even that is an abuse of email, IMO. Email should not be used as an advertising medium. Period. Announcements of that nature should be posted to a Corporate (internal) web site, not emailed to "all." Email should be used only for directed communications of importance to the recipients. Broadcast email: The same.

Otherwise what happens is people being to simply ignore their email.

I saw it happen. At one point, working for my last employer, that stuff became so prevalent I told management I needed to crack down on it. They prohibited me from doing so. "Ok," I replied, "but here's what will happen..."

Sure enough: After about the Nth time an email was sent and management again found a significant portion of employees knew nothing about it whatsoever, it was brought up at a company meeting. More than a few employees commented "I don't read my email anymore. Too much noise."

They allowed me to fix the problem

To: all@world.com
From: sigmonkey@null.
Reply-to: NRN
Subject: I am glad I am retired. [EOM]

I'm glad I'm retired too. Used to get tired of the "reply all" dummies who can't just reply to the sender. I think there should be a safety on the "reply all" button. Something like: "Do you REALLY want to reply to all 405 people on this email? Nothing like having your phone go off for hours from reply alls.....

In fairness, I plan to use this and Facebook to exact my revenge on society and be removed from everyone’s contacts within 3 months of retirement.

 
Back before I retired, one of things I did was to make up the workstation images to be ghosted onto new Windows workstations. The image included Outlook, which I took time to configure a bit before saving the image. One of the things I did was to remove the "Reply all" icon from the icon bar. "Reply all" was still available in the upper Menu bar, but many don't ever even go there. No one complained about its being gone, and the few who were savvy still used it from the Menu bar or restored the icon, but it did cut down on some careless use of the function. I also removed the preview message window, which can be a vector for infections. Some (who knew how) restored it, but we never got any tech support requests to do that. It was just accepted as "the way things are".