Only a few months following the reply-to-all tidal wave bringing down the email infrastructure at the Department of Homeland Security, the US State Department experienced a massive self-inflicted assault on their mail servers last week as well.

The State Departments responded by announcing “unspecified disciplinary actions” to employees who keep using reply-to-all, and they delivered this news via old-fashioned cable.

“Department staff hitting ‘reply to all’ on an e-mail with a large distribution list is causing an e-mail storm on the department’s OpenNet e-mail system,” says the unclassified cable that was sent Thursday by Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy.
He said the result was ‘effectively a denial of service as e-mail queues, especially between posts, back up while processing the extra volume of e-mails.

The cable orders employees to ‘take immediate action’ to ensure they and their colleagues are ‘aware of the negative impact’ of hitting ‘reply all’ and to delete e-mails addressed to large numbers of people that they might receive in error.

Anyone who disregards these instructions will be subject to disciplinary actions, Kennedy wrote in the cable, which begins:  Please ensure widest distribution of this message. Some also compounded the problem by trying to recall their initial replies, generating yet another round of messages.”

I am still amazed how little control many companies and government agencies assert over their critical communication infrastructure.  Distribution lists, reply-to-all, mail forwarding, restricted content, etc. should all be governed by administrative rules that protect the company from serious technical and legal consequences.

The technology certainly exists…

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