Has anyone ever created a mailing list called reply-all? I think that'd be entertaining. I'm not sure why, but the thought amuses me greatly right now.
Perhaps it's time that I stopped looking at the monitor.
Posted by jzawodn at May 13, 2003 04:26 PM
did you ever hear the one about "bedlam" at Microsoft? When I worked there some years ago, some wiseacre discovered an internal testing email alias named "bedlam" and they posted to this alias asking why they were on it and to be removed. As we all know asking to "unsubscribe" to the alias is a no-no, so many more people replied not-so-politely making this clear. Little did they all know, the alias included almost everyone at the company. And more and more people jumped on the bandwagon, telling people to "stop replying all" by replying all, til everyone's inbox we filled with these messages and ALL the Exchange servers were brought to their *knees*. Someone even made T-shirts about surviving the email storm with some of the choice holier-than-thou quotes on the reply chain.
Not sure if this is what you meant by "reply all" alias, but it reminded me...reply all can be very funny.
gayg: I actually had the same problem at an event I once attended. At one point I was receiving about 350 emails a day until someone figured out what the problem was and pulled the plug. Rather irritating
Would it not be more fun to call it 'reply-to'?
Thus anyone behaving, would reply to the reply-to address. Could also be very entertaining.
Years ago at a big german media company some employee thought it would be a good idea to warn everybody because of a dangerous virus - and forwarded the virus warning to nearly all available lists and aliases of the company. As I recognized (in seconds) that it was a virus hoax I replied "to all", thus inhibiting the email-avalanche to overwhelm all of our mailservers. The hard part - all the auto-replies, out of office mails etc. that happened to my mailbox for the next days. The amusing part, the last "back from holiday" reply arrived 2 month later :)
