Only use it when absolutely necessary, and be aware that an alarm will sound each time, even if it is only in people's heads. I encourage everyone to treat the “reply all” button like an emergency exit door. The server shut down, and we were unable to access our email for the rest of the day. I made sure to answer each one of them in a private email, but the mass emails kept coming. I don't know why most of them wrote back with the “reply all” button instead of just the regular “reply” button, but they did, and it flooded the server. I invited forty coworkers to the company barbecue, as directed by my boss. I got wrongfully blamed for an email storm at my job. Anyone who chooses to make their response public is taking the risk that they will cause a storm and make everyone on the list very unhappy with them. They need to realize that a mass email is not meant to be a type of social networking service, where everyone gets to see your comments.Ī mass email is for informative purposes only, and it should be responded to privately. Unless she replied to all every time she answered a question, she was not to blame.Įmail storms are caused by people who either don't know enough about their own email to respond in the correct manner or who want everyone to know their business. January 24, – It usually isn't the sender's fault when an email storm happens. I had a ton of mail like this to sort through, and I had to make filters to make all the addresses on the list go to my junk box. People were hitting “reply all” right and left, as though it were a public forum. She got into an argument with someone who did this, and the entire thing was public. Sometimes, she got so private with the details that her recipients would hit “reply all” just to point out to her and everyone else that this information was too private and we didn't want to know about it. I really didn't care to hear about the cute things her kids did or her various infections and antibiotics. She got my email address from previous correspondence and automatically added me to her newsletter recipient list. I had a friend who did a newsletter about her life each month and sent it to all her friends and acquaintances. People may hit “reply all” by accident and trigger an e-mail storm as infuriated subscribers respond to inform them that they didn't need to send the message to everyone, setting off a firestorm of e-mails. People can send messages out to everyone on the service with important information or correspondence, and individuals on the list can read these messages, reply to the sender, or choose to reply to all, sending a message to everyone on the list. Most commonly, an e-mail storm is associated with a listserv, a group of people signed up to an e-mail service. For this reason, steps are usually taken to prevent e-mail storms. While an e-mail storm can be a topic of humor or irritation, it can also potentially pose a problem, as servers may become so overloaded that the deluge of e-mail effectively creates a denial of service attack, shutting down the server. An e-mail storm is a situation where people start hitting “reply all” on e-mail messages sent to a group, causing a dramatic uptick in the number of messages handled by a server and leaving individuals with in-boxes laden with messages.

What is a quiet storm person