Microsoft Can Now Block 'Reply-All Storms' and We've Never Been More Relieved
Have you ever sent an email only to realize in horror that you hit Reply All instead of just Reply to the concerned person? Even worse, that triggers a Reply All-storm and before you know it, your inbox is flooded with emails from dozens or even hundreds of people replying to the email thread?
Microsoft has developed a solution to this so-called “reply allpocalypse” to help reduce the impact it can have on large organizations.
Initially designed to benefit big organizations with large distribution lists, the new reply-all protection feature can detect a budding “reply all” storm taking place and block subsequent attempts to reply all to the thread. The feature will also return a non-delivery receipt (NDR) to the sender. This block will remain in place for several hours.
The NDR looks like this:
According to Microsoft, the Reply All Storm Protection feature is triggered when it detects 10 reply-alls to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes. It will then block subsequent replies to the thread for four hours.
Reply-all email storms are a problem that affect businesses large and small, according to TheVerge.com. It even affected Microsoft itself in an incident employees now call Bedlam DL3. In 1997, around 25,000 people were on a distribution list and kept replying to the thread, generating 15,000,000 email messages and 195 gigabytes of data. The incident reportedly overwhelmed Microsoft’s own Exchange mail servers, and the company rolled out a message recipient limit in Exchange to try and tackle future problems.
Microsoft says it will continue to make tweaks and improvements to the new feature, which it has started to roll out in Office 365 and Exchange Online.
