Need to know versus reply to all

Help stamp out “Reply To All”. I’ve been reading a number of articles lately about this subject. This has long been a closely held belief of my own. It wastes time, bandwidth and frustrates the heck out of the receiver when there’s no need for it.

The latest is a video by Tim Sanders from Yahoo who says,

The more inexperienced you are on email or the more senior you are at a company the more likely you are to use “reply to all” to reply to every email you get including ones from one person in the first place!

Replying to all has been a dangerous practice for many years as has blatant forwarding. How many times have you received an email that has been forwarded to you and it contains every email address from everyone who has ever seen it as you scroll down to find the original message? This is a spam goldmine, folks! Not only that, but back in the early days of email (waaaaaaay back in the late ’80’s) I remember reading an article about a really cool way to build your list – just add a “bcc” to yourself onto an email that has an intriguing story, offer, ad or picture, and you will be forwarded on along and receive any and all addresses that the other people send your original message to.

Believe it or not!

Now, this particular function in email has been outlawed, though, if you can read through the original headers to your emails, (in some programs it’s called show full headers”) you can occasionally still  see where an email has been as well as where it hopes to go.

Another blogger, Jake Kuramoto on AppsLab,  says

So, today, my inbox was choked with about 30 messages all in the same thread. It was one of those ironic spam threads where at least 75% of the replies were unsubs or stern reminders not to reply to all, some of them in all caps, sent of course, to the whole list.

As far as I’m concerned, receiving emails that do not require action on my part or teach me something is a waste of my time. I average 400 emails a day as it is that I need to stay on top of. I’d much rather receive a couple of lines updating me on the final result of a conversation than all the chatter along the way.

So the next time you’re tempted to hit the “reply to all” button on your email program, think twice and resist the urge!