Use Reply All with caution

- Picture this. You've just received a message that your boss has accepted a position at another firm. The email was sent to the entire company. Within minutes, you have 42 new messages in your inbox. Most of these are congratulatory with well wishes. These senders have all committed the email faux pas of hitting Reply All. We all dread these messages. People routinely overuse Reply All when they should instead simply hit Reply, or forward the message to the specific audience they want to address. You want to avoid being a chronic Reply All responder. It annoys everyone on the email chain, and if people regularly see your name associated with emails they didn't need to receive, they start getting comfortable ignoring your messages. Another reason to avoid this is you can put your colleagues in an awkward position. If most of the team has responded to an email in the thread, this leaves the non-responders wondering, do they need to also, just to show their support and participation in the email discussion? This clutters everyone's inbox, and the team gets annoyed with both the originator of the message and everyone who participated in the back and forth banter. I can go on and on about stories where this has been problematic in professional settings. A colleague at an Ivy League University shared a story of what became known as the Reply All apocalypse. An email was accidentally sent to a list of hundreds. People started to Reply All, asking to be removed from the distribution, and then one person responded with a random fact, and encouraged others to do the same. This went on and on. While some thought it was funny, many were incredibly annoyed. You can easily see how this might be damaging for the reputation of the person who sent that first email, but the worst is when you hit Reply All on a negative message that was really intended for one person. Remember the example I started with of the boss who was leaving? Well, someone on the team accidentally hit Reply All, and responded with, "Thank goodness she's out of here," and then went on to state the things he didn't like about the manager. Yikes. Everyone in the company saw the message, and he had to write a second message to the whole list, apologizing for that first unprofessional email. There are two lessons in that story. It's a cautionary tale about Reply All, and a reminder not to put things in email you wouldn't want everyone to read.