Ever hit “reply all” on an email and accidentally send your personal business to everyone at your company? Fortunately I never have (knock on wood), but I know people who have. Including someone just a couple weeks ago at work.
It wasn’t a co-worker of mine that did it, but an outside company with whom we work. I sent an email to Outside Bossman and his assistant asking about a deadline date, and the admin replied and gave me the date. Then the boss responded to both of us and said that the deadline is actually two weeks earlier. But the kicker was a couple minutes later I got ANOTHER email from Outside Bossman that was clearly meant to only go to his assistant saying, “Don’t give them the real deadline – always tell them it’s due earlier than it really is.”
Nice.
At my old company, which was a very LARGE company with thousands of employees, one unfortunate soul that I worked with directly thought he was emailing a benefits question about his impending divorce finalization and subsequent marriage to his fiance’ to an HR person and instead selected an HR *group* in Outlook and promptly sent the email to a few hundred people – including me. I didn’t even know he was dating, much less about to have his divorce become finalized with plans to get remarried a month later.
Similarly, a blast email went out from HR at my old company and someone hit “reply all” to that email to ask a question about starting a 401K. She had never had a 401K and thought she should go ahead and start one ahead of her retirement. Which was in three years. But because she hit “reply all” it went to EVERYONE that received the HR blast email – and so we all knew that this poor woman basically had done nothing to save for her retirement but thought that 3 years with a 401K should be plenty. Bless her heart.
I try to never hit “reply all” and when I do, I consciously think about it before hitting that button. My new company has an unwritten rule that all emails should be drafted with NO names filled out – even when replying to an email, we are asked to remove all old emails and then add back in the folks we want to email. It’s not a requirement for us to do that, but it certainly makes good sense. It also makes me wonder what happened in the past at my company to make them tell me during training that that’s how I needed to prepare my emails.
It must be a doozy of a story.
We used to get group emails at IBM all the time. Pretty much every one ended up with at least one person replying to all, which then led to dozens of people, all responding to all, complaining about responding to all. It got so bad that the redefined groups to which emails could be sent to be much smaller, and banned putting more than one group on an email. Still got “reply all spam” but not as much.