Just recently I was speaking to a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer (PFE) who had just returned home from a rather arduous onsite dispatch. While onsite he was tasked with unwinding a phenomenon com...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
9 MIN READ
Removing "Reply All" Functionality for Outlook Users Who Participate in Reply-All Storms, via Group Policy: what to do
Hi Eric,
Great article!
It seems to me that over the years its becoming more clear that it is mostly a training/education issue. That said, I agree with Roady and the others that a drastic action like shutting off the functionality altogether is a bit extreme because it is necessary to keep co-workers in the loop in the normal course of business.
We find here at Sperry Software that a simple reminder to people - usually a prompt like "Are you SURE you want reply to everyone?" - is enough to make their training kick into gear and we created our Reply To All Monitor Outlook add-in based on this.
In my opinion, the Mailtips feature coming out in Outlook 2010 (whereby you get warnings about restricted recipients or a large number of recipients) will be enough to prevent many "BEDLAM DL3" events because it closely mirrors the concepts in our add-in...to just give the senders a chance to _think_ before they hit send. In fact, the Mailtips feature might be enough to drop the concerns about taking the Reply To All functionality out of Outlook altogether!
Mike Sperry
President
Sperry Software
Great article!
It seems to me that over the years its becoming more clear that it is mostly a training/education issue. That said, I agree with Roady and the others that a drastic action like shutting off the functionality altogether is a bit extreme because it is necessary to keep co-workers in the loop in the normal course of business.
We find here at Sperry Software that a simple reminder to people - usually a prompt like "Are you SURE you want reply to everyone?" - is enough to make their training kick into gear and we created our Reply To All Monitor Outlook add-in based on this.
In my opinion, the Mailtips feature coming out in Outlook 2010 (whereby you get warnings about restricted recipients or a large number of recipients) will be enough to prevent many "BEDLAM DL3" events because it closely mirrors the concepts in our add-in...to just give the senders a chance to _think_ before they hit send. In fact, the Mailtips feature might be enough to drop the concerns about taking the Reply To All functionality out of Outlook altogether!
Mike Sperry
President
Sperry Software