Corporate E-Mail

E-Mail has revolutionized the work environment. From scheduling meetings, sharing files, and regular communication E-Mail facilitates every aspect of work. And, while E-Mail can help streamline business decisions it also comes with the worst design idea ever: the reply all button.
I've never been a huge fan of that little button that looks so inviting. It seems like a great idea: allow e-mail to facilitate a discussion among multiple people by keeping everyone on the same page. This is a great and powerful tool. Like anything powerful, it's just waiting to be misused. And I'd call it the most frequently abused aspect of e-mail communication.
My first exposure to this abuse came from being on several listserves in college. It wasn't uncommon for people to hold private discussions via an entire listserve thanks to that dreadful little button. They, of course, wouldn't figure out the error of their ways until I knew far too much about their weekend plans or relationships.
However, the abuse isn't limited to college students. This week at work I was bombarded with my first corporate cluster-fudge E-Mail storm. I arrived at work and opened Outlook expecting nothing new. While BuCorp is an international company, I'm not typically subjected to the whims of the international facet of the operation. So, imagine my surprise when I had over 100 new messages... all with the same subject line. Not able to resist the urge, I had to read through them. Starting off innocently enough with an e-mail to the corporate policy office things quickly spun out of control. Interspersed with the typical "STOP HITTING REPLY ALL" and "OMG, why am I getting this e-mail?!?!" were a few winners. Personally, I really liked a reply from a sales rep that invited users to e-mail another sales rep to be removed from the e-mail chain. (Technical note: most people should have realized that there was no way this person could remove someone from the list.) About 45 minutes after that e-mail the sender sent out another informing everyone that his prior e-mail was joke. My hypothesis is that the subject of the joke suddenly became inundated with E-Mails asking to be removed from a list he had no knowledge of. I got a real kick out of this and thought the exchange was hilarious. Since the E-Mail administrators work in my area, I took a walk over to get their fix on the situation. They were irate. There were 8,000 employees on the distribution list accidentally included in the list. Most of the 8,000 employees work in BuCorp headquarters, and included in the list was the company CEO. After a rather strong e-mail about "reply all" E-Mails from the E-Mail administration group, the fun for the day ended and it was back to work for everyone. It was a great start to the day.