You wake up in the morning and notice you have a new email in your inbox.
It's from your boss announcing a staff meeting to your 50 person department and asking you to reply whether or not you are attending. You quickly send your reply and think that you can move on with your day. However, you are very wrong.
Your inbox starts blowing up; emails from your coworkers about the meeting keep rolling in. They hit the dreaded "reply all" option, and now everyone is receiving their one-word responses about attending the meeting. You want to scream, run, hide, or a combination of all three.
Unfortunately, this is a common reality. People love to use the "reply all" button when replying to an email. Maybe it's a mistake, maybe it's laziness, or maybe they want everyone to know their business when, news flash, no one cares. If you regularly reply all to emails, shame on you; it's extremely unnecessary 95% of the time.
Mailing systems often have separate buttons for "reply," "reply all," "forward," etc. Here is an example of that:
Double check what button you are pressing before replying to an email. Don't be lazy. Everyone hates when someone clearly didn't check before replying to an email and just hit reply all; everyone attached gets their message. Think; is this message really something that all 125 people on the email need to hear? If not, make sure you are just hitting "reply."
Make sure you read to the bottom of the email as well. I have seen many emails specify at the bottom to not reply all since it was sent to so many people. You know what people still do? Reply all. Take the time to actually read the email and see if it's necessary to reply all.
Oftentimes, reply all is only really necessary if you're in a small group that all need to know the information you're talking about. Even then, it can be a judgment call; is the information important to the whole group, or just the sender? If you want to reply to an email to multiple people, but not the whole group included, just create a new email or send it to those you want to.
It may not seem like it's a big deal to reply all to an email, but it really is. All of us get so many emails a day; it can be annoying and makes it harder to sort through for the important stuff. Stop replying all to emails, stop contributing to spam, and stop being mindless.
