This reminds me of the story Larry Osterman told about Bedlam DL3 [0] at Microsoft. I feel like this is a problem with few good, problem-free technical solutions.
"Do you really want to send this e-mail to 1,000,000 people?
[Yes, really] [No]"
With the latter option being focused by default and emphasized?
Yes, doing that is tricky deployment-wise with open protocols, but isn't the whole point of solutions like Exchange to enable system-wide shortcuts like that?
With an open solution the next best option is probably to have the mail server send a confirmation request email back to the user with a link to click if they really wanted to send it, instructions on how to reply with a confirmation etc.
It shouldn't even be an option for the vast majority of employees. Rather than their email being a binary permission (you either can or cannot send to members of the domain), it should have more access levels, including a higher access level "can send to MANY members of the domain" that would not be granted to most employees. Most employees would be in the middle tier, which would allow emails sent only up to some number of manageable recipients. And of course the big distribution lists that go to large numbers of employees should be configured so that only a small number of accounts can post to them.
At Google they had modified gmail at one point to take an email that was going to go to a lot of people and send it to your manager for approval. That worked pretty well. I believe the data indicated that sending it to anyone else for them to sign off on it helped. You could override a disapproval and send it anyway but that essentially created a willful act that later could be used as part of the reasoning behind your dismissal :-)
How many recipients were required to meet the "a lot" threshold? Really depressing place to work at if your manager is spying and micro managing you at this level.
Where I work the really big lists are all moderated, with only 3-5 people allowed to post to the list. If you need to post something there, you mail one of the moderators the text you want sent on the list, together with an explanation what it is about and why you can't target a smaller number of recipients.
Email got a lot more boring since this was introduced.
Do you remember circa when this was? I was there for a few years and I remember a couple of amusing incidents of people sending "I'll be late today" to thousands of 10k+ people. Presumably that wasn't manager-approved.
This feature exists in Exchange! It's called MailTips. It warns senders in Outlook and Outlook Web App before sending of a number of conditions (including sending to a "large audience").
I was the PM who owned MailTips when it was created/introduced, and our research at the time showed it would be effective for preventing reply-all storms.
Implementing this is, of course, harder than you think. The size of groups has to be calculated nightly and distributed to every server, since groups can be nested (and have duplicate recipients).
It's funny how often it seems like software authors have a time machine. As soon as you get frustrated enough to make a feature request, they go back in time to implement it and pretend like it was always available.
From my own experience: Once you reach an audience in the hundreds of millions you're bombarded with edge cases issues daily..you just chose to prioritize addressing them or not.
That they make it to the mainstream, which in this case caused us to have this specific conversation is very unusual and can take a lot of time.
I just had to stop reading, the bad math was too bad (a quarter of 100000 is 13000, then it becomes briefly 25000 and goes back to 13000, and 10% of 13000 is 130...)
I wonder how many emails per day the system usually handles; I would say I probably receive on the order of 100 emails a day (although most of those are automated messages) and probably send half a dozen, and I'm definitely on the low end.
I wonder if most employees lack the needed permission to send an e-mail to 1.2 million recipients. It seems like a smart thing to restrict that kind of action, precisely to avoid havoc.
Another possibility is that dealing with messages that have 1.2 million recipients so overloads the system that it it has only been able to deliver 120 of them so far.
It's been quite a few years since I was last an Exchange administrator, but I seem to recall that you could secure a distribution list such that only authorized members could send mail to it. Perhaps (hopefully) only a relatively small group at NHS are allowed to mail all 1.2M mailboxes, and within that group there are 120 very silly people.
It's probably a list, so the actual email has only one recipient. Something essentially expands this list to deliver a separate message to each individual recipient.
Most email servers support that behavior, but it's a list-specific setting. Just because a list is large doesn't mean there's a point where you always want to restrict replies.
That's exactly what they did do though. See http://support.nhs.net/servicestatus by 09:45 they'd disabled the distribution list and updated their service status page. There were that many emails in the system that at 15:30 people were still receiving emails sent at 09:30.
It's "the NHS" even if you're talking about something not strictly the NHS, such as GP surgeries. And it's "the NHS" when talking about different NHS trusts such as a hospitals trust or a mental health trust.
What I meant was which of the four NHSs (which have a lot of different infrastructure) does this apply to? Or to all four - which in itself would be interesting.
NHS England and Scotland. NHS Wales use something else I think, I'd guess NHS NI do too.
Not all of NHS England use .nhs.net, it's up to each trust if they want to keep running their own email or migrate to .nhs.net which is centrally managed.
For context, the NHS is one of the largest employers in the world. The list[1] currently goes:
- US Department of Defense
- The Chinese Army
- Walmart
- McDonalds
- The NHS
And The NHS's staff are all far more likely to actually have to use a computer and email in their day-to-day work than most of those Walmart and McDonalds employees.
As an anecdote, having worked as a contractor for the DoD, the amount of mail received (internally) that is not relevant to your actual work or job is somewhat astronomical, 90–95% for me. There are many, many lists, warnings, notices, digests, alerts, etc.
We sometimes get situations where there's a semi-important note in a daily newsletter, and the group secretary decides to copy-paste it in an email to the whole group. Then the level 1 manager doesn't look at the To: line and forwards it to the whole group again. Then our level 2 manager gets the same information from someone else and forwards it to the entire group as well. I'll get the exact same information about today's health and wellness walk or whatever upwards of 3-4 times.
McDonalds doesn't really belong on the list as they include employees of franchises. Or if does than there are some other organizations that belong on the list as well -- such as the Roman Catholic Church.
The RCC does not provide a world- or even countrywide emailing system for clergy people, maybe except the Vatican. I did a little gig for a church group once, chances are high that most of them are technically illiterate and are happy if some dude like me throws 'em a Wordpress template and a (back in the days) free Google Apps mail account.
why does the accounting designation of a "franchise" imply the employee shouldn't be counted ? They wear a uniform that says McDonalds, they show up 40+ hrs/week at a building that has "McDonalds" written on it. The product they sell has McDonalds written everywhere on it. Advertisements say "go to McDonalds", not "Go to your nearest McDonalds Franchise". What makes them not an employee of McDonalds ?
If the franchise owner doesn't pay its employees, they cannot go to McDonalds headquarters to get their money.
If somebody sues a McDonalds shop and gets awarded a large sum of money, they cannot go and get it from McDonalds headquarters.
If McDonalds were to go bankrupt, emplyees would still have a job (possibly not for very long, as your employer may decide to close shop, but he might also consider continuing under his own name or to start working for another franchise organization)
(Having said that, McDonalds exerts quite some control over what their franchisers can and cannot do. It would not surprise me if judges, in some/many, would rule McDonalds to be responsible for what happens at its franchises, for example in cases involving hygiene)
so basically its done to gut workers' rights. The person behind the counter isn't an "employee" but a "third-party contractor". How clever. But yet if you protest "inequality" a whole segment of the population will write you off as being a leftist hippie as if nothing's wrong.
If there is ever a violent revolution in our lifetime, I think future generations will read about this stuff in history books as foretelling omens. And I'm talking about the bigger picture here, not just MCD:
* You're not an employee, you're a contractor.
* You have "rights", just not the same rights as the shareholders you work for.
* Don't hate us, you were harmed by a third party, take it up with them.
* Vote for tweedle-dee next time instead of tweedle-dum, tweedle-dee is "for the people" (meanwhile corporation paid equal amounts to both candidates).
I see the bigger picture as eroding the personhood and agency of the poor, through the most elaborate and creative accounting and legislation imaginable.
No, it'a not done to gut workers rights. The workers are still employees, of the franchise owner. It is done because expanding through franchises is a lot quicker and less risky than expanding company owners stores, because someone else puts up the capital and assumes the risk of failure.
There's also the point of view that the franchisees are in the burger flipping business (and employ burger flippers), while Mc Donalds the parent corp are actually in the real estate business. (It's not _entirely_ true, but it's a quite plausible explanation of how their business works...)
This is wildly inaccurate. It seems like you've taken the arguments against e.g. Uber assumed that they apply to McDonald's. The employees not being McDonald's employees is a consequence of the franchise model, not some nefarious plot to strip them of rights. They are so clearly "employees" and not "contractors" that not even the most disruptive SV company would attempt to push that past the IRS.
what a coincidence that a "consequence of the franchise model" is the inability to unionize, since each franchise is owned independently. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the structuring of the franchise, does it ?
They can still unionize because they are still employees. Franchising is a perfectly normal business structure in industries like fast food and supermarkets, just like cooperatives exists certain other industries.
It's true that the franchise model is in practice an impediment to unionization. But this argument represents a huge shifting of the goalposts from your original incorrect claim that they are contractors and not employees.
This is actually being actively questioned in court. MCD provides significant technology to it's franchisors with regards to scheduling employees. Unions are asserting that this scheduling means they are a primary employer, and thus a Union would be able to collectively bargain with the entirety of MCD.
It looks to me (based on outdated statistics [1]) that the Roman Catholic Church would come in at the bottom of the list, with "just under a million". If you can find better statistics, Wikipedia has a handy "edit" button for you to use!
I think the iOS "unsubscribe" banner could be adding to the chaos. Not sure about this exact situation, but I've been caught in mailing lists where people instinctually hit the unsubscribe prompt which just sends an email with text saying "unsubscribe", therefor blasting everyone in the thread and not actually unsubscribing them.
That should only happen for lists that have a List-Unsubscribe header. If the iOS mail client does that for arbitrary mails, that seems horribly broken.
Pro tip to escape this kind of situation : reply to the last email but spoof a fake email address as sender. Now, for everybody who's gonna use the last email to reply (your email then) your email address doesn't appear anywhere.
You might need to repeat this process a few times since people don't always reply to your email, but it works pretty well.
>You might need to repeat this process a few times
You're suggesting adding millions of extra emails to the system here. I think the best thing to do is wait, or create a rule based on the subject line.
In this very specific context, your are absolutely right since the main problem is not the little annoyance experimented by the email receivers, but the global overloading of the mailing infrastructure.
But this is a really exceptionnel situation, while being trapped in a reply-to-all loop is not that uncommon.
I was caught in an email storm like this one time.
Someone at a large insurance company accidentally sent an email containing a few patient names/dobs to a group-email mailing list of at least 1000+ outside emails.
It took about 2 months before the storm finally ended.
It became comical how many responders to the email chastised the original sender for "HIPAA violations" using Reply-All thereby inadvertently committing the same infraction themselves because the original email was included at the bottom of the reply.
Also, several times, after 2-3 days of quiet, someone would come back from vacation and reply-all with "I think you sent this to the wrong person", thereby starting the storm all over again.
The company of the original sender seemed powerless to stop it, but I always wondered if they could have just disabled/deleted that group-email mailing list.
Easy enough to setup an authorized senders list. Really any group with a significant number of recipients should have that or failing that some way for a user to remove themselves.
I just moved to the outlook webmail in a large-ish organization. It surprised me that Reply All is the default reply-button, and a regular reply requires expanding a drop down! The ui really encourages the mistake.
For mails not sent to millions of people, Reply All is the correct default; anyone receiving the original mail should normally see the reply, and narrowing the communication to a subset of people should require thought (and often an explanation).
To help avoid this situation, when sending emails to a large number of people (or a list that goes to a large number of people), if you know that responses should not go to that same set of people, use BCC.
There is no correct default, show both buttons next to each other with the same size! Now you have to open a tiny drop down to get to normal reply, it's very easy to forget that there is another option there just replying to all without thinking.
I was caught in 'reply-all' email hell, but not at such scale. It was with about 5000 users. It was hilarious actually, but I can imagine a lot of people will find this annoying.
The advice at the end is pretty important - if you want the thread to die, just ignore it. All told people mostly followed this, and if only 120 replies were sent in an organisation as huge as the NHS then that's pretty incredible. In our company's "social" list the silly reply-all chains have a very predictable pattern, coming in a series of waves:
1. original sensible email like "hey guys, I have some honey/walnuts/fruit/spirits from my hometown if anyone wants to try/buy"
2. sensible replies start rolling in, but which were accidentally sent to all
3. some jokers/trolls send memes in response (also reply all)
4. the whining begins, people reply-all asking everyone to stop spamming them
5. the memers reply (sometimes with more memes) that it is the optional "social" list that's for this sort of nonserious/fun stuff.
6. some helpful problem-solvers weigh in, sending reply-all instructions (often including MS Paint'd diagrams) on how to unsubscribe from the list or apply an outlook filter
7. finally the "can everyone just stop replying to this though?" emails start, also reply-all (and apparently oblivious to the contradiction/irony of their own reply-all) and everyone participating starts to realise it should be ignored...
Once you recognise the pattern it becomes pretty enjoyable identifying which stage of this month's "Emailgate" you're currently at - the whole thing can around to 45-60 mins to play out.
You assume there is anyone working on Office 365 OWA who is doing anything but the mandatory re-skinning whenever MSFT rebrands their Office/cloud offerings yet again.
But evidence points to the contrary; to wit, they have yet to implement S/MIME signed email in anything but an incredibly useless way: the email is not displayed, but a link says "This is not supported in the current view, please click here", and when you click it a popup (Yes! A real 1997 era popup! That your browser will complain about and induces even more clicks! OWA loves them!) appears that displays the actual message but fails to verify the signature.
One of my favourite days at work in a large bank was when someone sent a boring email to the wrong list. It was a big list. A few people replied all saying "can you remove me from this list please". Then more people replied saying "can you please stop replying all on this thread". Then people said "can you remove me from this list please" again replying all.
The mail servers slowed to a crawl. We had thousands of emails. It began at 9am GMT. Eventually after about 3 or so hours everything calmed down and we could send mail again, albeit with a large delay.
Around 12:30 the US workers began coming in, openend outlook and saw all the emails. And instead of scrolling down they sent an email, reply all "could you remove me from this list". Again people replied "stop replying all" on reply all. We were up and running again! Mail was down for the rest of the day.
The next day some people who were off the day before came in and there was again a brief storm, but sadly this one only lasted around 30 minutes.
One of the biggest banks. Lasted a whole day. We christened it "moron storm".
Since these are so trivial to halt and blow away everything in the queue from the thread I can only imagine the sysadmins in charge of these mail systems are letting it continue for comedic effect. That or they have to jump through weeks of change control hoops so letting it play out is faster.
It's probably Exchange so nuking the offending messages in the mail queues on the transports during a mail storm is par for the course. Even if they're distributed. The messages already hitting the mailbox hosts would definitely be causing a bad time though.
Banks have legal constraints on doing that (the need to record all employee communications) which might have made life difficult in this particular case. I agree in general that the mail sysadmins ideally ought to be able to nip this kind of thing in the bud.
Ah, yes–it's a bank. That's a great point. Not sure what I was thinking. I imagine you could set up a separate transport with special rules that dumps them somewhere outside of the normal mail infrastructure for that message thread but it wouldn't be worth it when the problem happens infrequently and just adding sender restrictions to the list is quick and effective.
8.Someone high up the food chain steps in with a strongly worded email to stop replying. A brief moment of calm ensues
9.Some smart jack replies all - "I'll try to do that"
That's ignoring the stage of "please take me off this list" - which, in my opinion, makes it a lot worse since then people suddenly feel like they CAN do something, namely, ask to be taken off the list.
This is especially compounded when it's a list that never has anything you want on it anyway - say it's some sort of distro that is usually used for the corporate newsletter.
The best one I've been in was a scientific conference mailing list where the first email sent out instructed users to reply with "Unsubscribe" if they wanted off the list, but the reply-to address was set to the post-to-list address. So ordinary replies were converted into reply-to-all. Hilarity ensued.
From the BBCs coverage (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/37979456), it seems like the problem was caused by a contractor setting up a full-org distribution list by mistake. This DL would have appeared as a single (unfamiliar) email address to most recipients, making it less obvious that "reply-all" would actually send a message to a million receipients.
The NHS resolved the issue by killing the offending DL reasonably quickly, which would stop further replies from being generated. This is also the reason why only about a hundred folks (out of a million) replied-all to the message.
Man, i have such sympathy for that nameless engineer whose fault it was. I know exactly the fight-or-flight-like feeling of "oh shit, I fucked up!", even though I've never fucked up on this massive scale.
Not the contractors fault at all! People make mistakes. If your design depends on user vigilance then its YOUR fault. People make mistakes! A single 'rogue' should not be able to take down the entire show just by sending an email. The problem was exacerbated mainly the software being used made by Microsoft - a fairly ubiquitous but non-standard, proprietary system. It has no place in a public entity like the NHS. Sack the highly paid idiots who procured it at great expense over cheaper and higher quality alternatives instead.
I received such a mail from Microsoft a few years back. It was something related to WP/W8 development with thousands or tens of thousands (IIRC) of email addresses in the "to" field, so probably all registered app devs. I tried to send a witty response, but my mail server (ironically on outlook.com) refused to do it.
I assume all mails run over NHS controlled mailservers. Some administrator could just step up and kill/block the email thread, right? Shouldn't be that hard of a problem...
That's exactly what they did. "The distribution list has been removed and associated emails are being traced and cleared." See http://support.nhs.net/servicestatus
This happened at Qualcomm once. I think it was an IT email too. It went out to most of the corp and what really started the issue was people's vacation/out-of-office auto-reply-all messages -- those really started magnifying problem. Then people started making it even worse by reply-all sending "remove me from this list!" etc. The most funny messages were the reply-all that said "Stop sending reply all to the whole list!" It lasted most of the day...
By the way, does anybody know of a valid reason why vacation/out-of-office messages shouldn't be forbidden forever? Has any organization ever had any positive outcome whatsoever from their members having those autoreplies?
Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.
So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.
It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...
...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:
Ah. This reminds me of a great story in Amazon of a conference room booking email gone wrong. The email was inadvertently sent to the entire company, so that employees in Japan, China, Scotland, France, etc. all knew of this fabled booking. At its peak over 280k emails were being delivered throughout the company.
Also good to remember: replying UNSUBSCRIBE to an email list is typically not how you go about it.
I remember this happening at Google, but I'm not sure if it was the entire company or just something like eng-announce. I myself once had the wrong CL # on my clipboard and attached a random CL of mine to a bug that Jeff Dean had opened about a development tool used by every engineer (with very active discussion across the engineer on the bug). I don't remember these incidents being treated with anything but mild amusement, certainly not "email hell". This probably has something to do with the fact that GMail makes it pretty easy to block an email thread.
I was once part of a ~20k person reply-all chain. After a while I sent an email to each person who sent yet another reply-all asking to be removed an individual email explaining how dumb they were, in the nicest, most professionally appropriate way possible. None of them replied to me.
145 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] thread[0] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...
[Yes, really] [No]"
With the latter option being focused by default and emphasized?
Yes, doing that is tricky deployment-wise with open protocols, but isn't the whole point of solutions like Exchange to enable system-wide shortcuts like that?
With an open solution the next best option is probably to have the mail server send a confirmation request email back to the user with a link to click if they really wanted to send it, instructions on how to reply with a confirmation etc.
Something about that sounds so fascist.
This is also better than Outlook's solution, which is simply "you can't send to that mailing list at all".
Email got a lot more boring since this was introduced.
Please fill out the reason for that on this form and we'll get back to you.
I was the PM who owned MailTips when it was created/introduced, and our research at the time showed it would be effective for preventing reply-all storms.
Implementing this is, of course, harder than you think. The size of groups has to be calculated nightly and distributed to every server, since groups can be nested (and have duplicate recipients).
So this is what it feels like to predict the past...
I found that it's enabled and configured to 25 by default. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj649091%28v=exc...
(Nice url.)
I was assuming the NHS runs on Microsoft. Does anyone know?
That they make it to the mainstream, which in this case caused us to have this specific conversation is very unusual and can take a lot of time.
1/4 of 55,000 = 13,0000.
That seems to have been where the writer got confused.
Looks like there are lot of sensible folk in the NHS, or else they haven't yet all had a chance to check their e-mails between shifts...
Another possibility is that dealing with messages that have 1.2 million recipients so overloads the system that it it has only been able to deliver 120 of them so far.
Is it not possible to configure their email server to disallow emails with over X recipients from sending?
I would expect the server to refuse to send to "all@nhs.gov.uk" unless the sender is on some sort of pre-approved list.
Some individual trusts have @trust.nhs.uk addresses, most - probably two thirds use the .nhs.net system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service
The terms "National Health Service" or "NHS" are also used to refer to the four systems collectively.
Not all of NHS England use .nhs.net, it's up to each trust if they want to keep running their own email or migrate to .nhs.net which is centrally managed.
- US Department of Defense
- The Chinese Army
- Walmart
- McDonalds
- The NHS
And The NHS's staff are all far more likely to actually have to use a computer and email in their day-to-day work than most of those Walmart and McDonalds employees.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
The RCC does not provide a world- or even countrywide emailing system for clergy people, maybe except the Vatican. I did a little gig for a church group once, chances are high that most of them are technically illiterate and are happy if some dude like me throws 'em a Wordpress template and a (back in the days) free Google Apps mail account.
Indian Railways is another large employer with unique technology problems.
If somebody sues a McDonalds shop and gets awarded a large sum of money, they cannot go and get it from McDonalds headquarters.
If McDonalds were to go bankrupt, emplyees would still have a job (possibly not for very long, as your employer may decide to close shop, but he might also consider continuing under his own name or to start working for another franchise organization)
(Having said that, McDonalds exerts quite some control over what their franchisers can and cannot do. It would not surprise me if judges, in some/many, would rule McDonalds to be responsible for what happens at its franchises, for example in cases involving hygiene)
If there is ever a violent revolution in our lifetime, I think future generations will read about this stuff in history books as foretelling omens. And I'm talking about the bigger picture here, not just MCD:
* You're not an employee, you're a contractor.
* You have "rights", just not the same rights as the shareholders you work for.
* Don't hate us, you were harmed by a third party, take it up with them.
* Vote for tweedle-dee next time instead of tweedle-dum, tweedle-dee is "for the people" (meanwhile corporation paid equal amounts to both candidates).
I see the bigger picture as eroding the personhood and agency of the poor, through the most elaborate and creative accounting and legislation imaginable.
what a coincidence that a "consequence of the franchise model" is the inability to unionize, since each franchise is owned independently. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the structuring of the franchise, does it ?
[1]http://www.tldm.org/News11/DevastatingDeclineReligiousOrders...
Yet nobody can be found in that entire throng who can command an e-mail server into putting a swift end to a runaway thread.
EDIT: Maybe it's a mailing list so there's just one address.
You might need to repeat this process a few times since people don't always reply to your email, but it works pretty well.
You're suggesting adding millions of extra emails to the system here. I think the best thing to do is wait, or create a rule based on the subject line.
But this is a really exceptionnel situation, while being trapped in a reply-to-all loop is not that uncommon.
It took about 2 months before the storm finally ended.
It became comical how many responders to the email chastised the original sender for "HIPAA violations" using Reply-All thereby inadvertently committing the same infraction themselves because the original email was included at the bottom of the reply.
Also, several times, after 2-3 days of quiet, someone would come back from vacation and reply-all with "I think you sent this to the wrong person", thereby starting the storm all over again.
The company of the original sender seemed powerless to stop it, but I always wondered if they could have just disabled/deleted that group-email mailing list.
To help avoid this situation, when sending emails to a large number of people (or a list that goes to a large number of people), if you know that responses should not go to that same set of people, use BCC.
(if the comment permalink doesn't work, please search for "Reply-All can get even more fun when")
http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...
1. original sensible email like "hey guys, I have some honey/walnuts/fruit/spirits from my hometown if anyone wants to try/buy"
2. sensible replies start rolling in, but which were accidentally sent to all
3. some jokers/trolls send memes in response (also reply all)
4. the whining begins, people reply-all asking everyone to stop spamming them
5. the memers reply (sometimes with more memes) that it is the optional "social" list that's for this sort of nonserious/fun stuff.
6. some helpful problem-solvers weigh in, sending reply-all instructions (often including MS Paint'd diagrams) on how to unsubscribe from the list or apply an outlook filter
7. finally the "can everyone just stop replying to this though?" emails start, also reply-all (and apparently oblivious to the contradiction/irony of their own reply-all) and everyone participating starts to realise it should be ignored...
Once you recognise the pattern it becomes pretty enjoyable identifying which stage of this month's "Emailgate" you're currently at - the whole thing can around to 45-60 mins to play out.
One can right click and then Ignore the thread, but presumably nobody is aware of this or we wouldn't be having this conversation.
But evidence points to the contrary; to wit, they have yet to implement S/MIME signed email in anything but an incredibly useless way: the email is not displayed, but a link says "This is not supported in the current view, please click here", and when you click it a popup (Yes! A real 1997 era popup! That your browser will complain about and induces even more clicks! OWA loves them!) appears that displays the actual message but fails to verify the signature.
The mail servers slowed to a crawl. We had thousands of emails. It began at 9am GMT. Eventually after about 3 or so hours everything calmed down and we could send mail again, albeit with a large delay.
Around 12:30 the US workers began coming in, openend outlook and saw all the emails. And instead of scrolling down they sent an email, reply all "could you remove me from this list". Again people replied "stop replying all" on reply all. We were up and running again! Mail was down for the rest of the day.
The next day some people who were off the day before came in and there was again a brief storm, but sadly this one only lasted around 30 minutes.
One of the biggest banks. Lasted a whole day. We christened it "moron storm".
This is especially compounded when it's a list that never has anything you want on it anyway - say it's some sort of distro that is usually used for the corporate newsletter.
Hilarious to watch I must say.
However, it might not work any more, as people are no longer familiar with Majordomo mailing lists.
The NHS resolved the issue by killing the offending DL reasonably quickly, which would stop further replies from being generated. This is also the reason why only about a hundred folks (out of a million) replied-all to the message.
So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.
It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...
...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:
http://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard
Also good to remember: replying UNSUBSCRIBE to an email list is typically not how you go about it.