Just a couple of days ago, the mammoth straw was cast upon my unsuspecting back and I snapped. Like Chinese water torture, the torrents of Reply All comments had dripped and dripped into my inbox. I duly deleted them.
Fortunately with auto-view I can see the rubbish that people dump in Reply All mails and quickly abandon even opening them up to get annoyed at the nonsense people write in such mails - and the irrelevance they contain - sometimes even to the original sender.
This latest instance was a valid request from a colleague for information to help secure a client contract - a noble aim indeed. However, the innocuous, unhelpful, unfettered garbage that ensued was pique of waste.
A waste of effort on the senders' part; a waste of time for the poor original sender - since all the comments were saying "Sorry, I don't have anything...!"; and a waste in general for all the other poor sods in the Reply All To box. [This is not to mention the waste of electrons whizzing around the planet to send the emails from sender to all the recipients, then from the stupid recipients back to all the other recipients and then on top of that all the Out of Office Notifications that are returned to said stupid recipients who hit Reply All.]
So what did I do? Well I hit Reply All and kindly - it was polite I must confess - requested people to at least "think" before they robotically hit Reply All - I was hoping to keep my inbox a little cleaner and my synapses too...!
No wonder emails go unanswered, no wonder mails are lost in the forest of junk we get in our inboxes.
Join the crusade - tell the stupid ones, that we, the enlightened, will not hit Reply All, unless it's relevant to all those in the To line and edit the recipient list to make sure we are communicating sensibly as opposed to blindly, bumblingly and in a bothersome way. The notes of "well said" I got back from people I don't even know suggests there is a war in great need of being waged here.
You can't hit Reply All on this blog - but you could forward to others to help share the message and clog up your friends' inboxes.
How ironic would that be!!!
Fortunately with auto-view I can see the rubbish that people dump in Reply All mails and quickly abandon even opening them up to get annoyed at the nonsense people write in such mails - and the irrelevance they contain - sometimes even to the original sender.
This latest instance was a valid request from a colleague for information to help secure a client contract - a noble aim indeed. However, the innocuous, unhelpful, unfettered garbage that ensued was pique of waste.
A waste of effort on the senders' part; a waste of time for the poor original sender - since all the comments were saying "Sorry, I don't have anything...!"; and a waste in general for all the other poor sods in the Reply All To box. [This is not to mention the waste of electrons whizzing around the planet to send the emails from sender to all the recipients, then from the stupid recipients back to all the other recipients and then on top of that all the Out of Office Notifications that are returned to said stupid recipients who hit Reply All.]
No wonder emails go unanswered, no wonder mails are lost in the forest of junk we get in our inboxes.
Join the crusade - tell the stupid ones, that we, the enlightened, will not hit Reply All, unless it's relevant to all those in the To line and edit the recipient list to make sure we are communicating sensibly as opposed to blindly, bumblingly and in a bothersome way. The notes of "well said" I got back from people I don't even know suggests there is a war in great need of being waged here.
You can't hit Reply All on this blog - but you could forward to others to help share the message and clog up your friends' inboxes.
How ironic would that be!!!
My boyfriend Rob just did the exact same thing last week. Fight the power, Darren! -Elsa-
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