Please stop replying all!

Microsoft is a great place to work. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of incredible, world class products including Office, SQL Server, the Microsoft Mouse, and a number of others. I work with very smart people too. Occasionally, it’s easy to forget that even smart people do really stupid things sometimes.

This morning my iPad (yes, I have an iPad) started ringing out email notifications. I wondered what was going on and pulled my Windows 7 Phone out of my pocket. Yes, it was another “reply all” email storm. Inevitably someone notices they’re getting spam or are simply on a distribution list and send an email to the entire distribution list asking something really stupid like “Why am I on this list?” or “Who is the owner of this list?” or the incredibly inane “me too!” That’s really dumb. But the fall down ironically stupid thing to do is to reply to everyone on the list just to say “Please don’t reply all!” The problem here is that everyone else is doing the same thing. On a distribution list that’s 28,000 people strong, at prime time in the morning when everyone is catching up on email, that’s a sure way to bring down the email servers.

It reminded me of the great email storm of the 90’s. Old timers at Microsoft refer to it as the “bedlam storm”. There was a distribution list called bedlam dl3 that had virtually everyone at Microsoft on it. Someone sent an email to the alias, which as it oddly enough turns out, was a test alias for stress testing the email servers or something like that. Anyway, for a company that runs on email, that email storm was a catastrophe. People simply went home because they couldn’t get anything done, couldn’t even get their calendars to show up. It took longer than a day for the email servers to catch up.

The one this morning wasn’t nearly so bad. Microsoft IT and the products themselves have policies and built in tools for handling such things, cutting it off at the knees and mitigating the impact. That’s a positive and it’s encouraging that what could have been a business crippling event turned out to be a simple study in social behavior. What’s discouraging is that even at a place with people as technologically savvy and supposedly very smart people, we still have these kinds of things happening. It’s one of those very interesting social behaviors that I’d love to see studied. Undoubtedly there’s some interesting tradeoffs happening in people’s heads related to the low cost of a seemingly inconsequential act creating the feeling of being included in some social event in the aggregate adding up to something very significant. Something like the lottery, voting, chaos theory, political discourse, Kony2012 and facebook.