The NHS's 1.2 Million Employees Are Trapped in a 'Reply-All' Email Thread (businessinsider.com) 302
An anonymous reader shares a Business Insider report:The NHS's 1.2 million employees are currently trapped in a "reply-all" email hell. A "test" email was accidentally sent to everyone who works at the UK health service - prompting a series of reply-all responses from annoyed recipients going out to all 1-million-plus employees of the organisations. An NHS employee told Business Insider that there have been at least 120 replies so far -- meaning that more than 140 million needless emails have been sent across the NHS's network today. As a result, they said, its email systems are running "very slow today." The NHS Pensions department is currently warning people on Twitter that "if contacting us by email please be aware that there may be delays in responding due to an issue currently affecting all NHS mail."
Please remove (Score:5, Funny)
Please remove me from this distribution, I don't know how I got on it.
Re:Please remove (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Please remove (Score:5, Funny)
*replies all*
Hey everyone, stop replying all! This is very annoying.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Re: Re: TestEmail
It's people like you that are making this chain keep going! Just stop replying!
Re:Please remove (Score:5, Funny)
Can people stop replying to this. Thanks.
Re:Please remove (Score:5, Insightful)
It's almost as if there's no way for the mail server to filter messages with more than a million recipients.
Re: Please remove (Score:2)
Re: Please remove (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you for your message. I am out of the office until 23/11/2016. For immediate service, please contact the Help Desk.
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I can't unsubscribe you! Call IT!
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~~~Big minds discuss ideas, small minds discus people~~~
-George Carlin
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I can't get through to IT, the phones have been busy for hours! What do we even pay those guys for?
Please unsubscribe.
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Hey, you spelled unsubscribe wrong. Please use a spellchecker everybody. We don't want to look unprofessional.
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Please direct this request to IT and stop replying to all!!!!111oneone
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I don't know that cc:Mail has that functionality ;)
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Simple? (Score:3)
Re:Please remove (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that mail clients don't know whether the "all@" mailing list email expands to five users or five million. As far as it is concerned, you're sending it to one address.
The correct solution is server-side, not client-side. Specify a policy that any mailing list with more than... say thirty people must have an authorized senders list, and must reject emails from anyone not on that list. That way, when someone responds to the "all@" list without a "Resent-From" header from someone on the authorized senders list, it will get dropped.
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+1 insightful.
Most of our mailing lists have a small set of approved senders and nobody else can send to that list.
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At might last jb, we didn't until someone from HR accidentally sent to the whole company a spreadsheet with everyone's names, addresses, socials, and salary instead of the company picnic flyer.
That person was fired and the solution was to institute those limits.
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Don't reply-all telling people not to reply-all!!
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Sorry!! I meant to hit Reply not Reply-All!
And sorry again dammit!
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Moving slashdot to BCC.
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Please remove me from this list
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Please don't "Reply all" unless you put the list in "BCC".
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Sorry about the last post, I forgot to put everybody into BCC.
Re:Please remove (Score:5, Funny)
Me too!
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Me too.
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People, please! Stop asking to be removed, it doesn't work that way!
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When I say "stop it" the whole world is supposed to obey.
Just because it didn't work at any point in school, the recent election, the Super Bowl, during Rush Hour, or at the Tsunami is no reason to expect it isn't different this time.
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Can someone explain why people would ever react like this? If the company that pays your salary puts you in a internal mailing list, why would anyone assume that it was OK to ask to be taken out of it?
Re:Please remove (Score:4, Informative)
Because sometimes you change positions and should no longer be on a mailing list that had something to do with your old role, but the list administrator (who *might* not be IT, in fact likely isn't) hasn't taken you off it.
I had this happen when I transferred to an entirely different team, and over 5 months later was still getting e-mail from a list that the manager of the team refused to take me off of (it was retaliation for leaving his team). Finally with the [written] consent of my current boss I started openly replying to the list's questions with bogus info that looked correct. Nothing earth shattering, but also not quite right. Hilarity ensued.
I should add this list produced at least 50 emails a day!
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Re:Please remove (Score:4, Funny)
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You seem to be unaware that NHS = National Health Service, so it's not a company but a government organisation.
Re:Please remove (Score:4, Interesting)
Stop using "reply all" you idiots! It's only making things worst!
And I have also found a limit on the number of nested blockquotes we can do on Slashdot so I had to simplify my reply and make it un-nested blockquotes otherwise it would not accept my reply with a "Your comment has too few characters per line" warning! My joke has been ruined!
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This happened in my company once. People kept replying to all, it was a clusterfuck and our company IT (in India, of course) couldn't figure out how to stop it.
So I set up an auto-reply mechanism that looked like it came from IT, it told anyone who replied "ALL" that they were now removed from all company mailing lists.
Of course everyone freaked out and emailed IT when they would get my notice. IT was pissed at me, but I stopped people from replying to ALL any more.
Re: Please remove (Score:2)
If the reply to is a list with everyone on it, reply and reply ask are equivalent
I survived (Score:5, Interesting)
I survived Bedlam DL3 [microsoft.com]
The story of when Microsoft themselves fell victim to the same issue, and how it was resolved.
Re:I survived (Score:5, Funny)
I lived through one at a large, global financial company. It was kind of humorous.
Some lady in a small European office of the company attended a company sponsored Halloween party dressed as a policewoman. Part of her costume included mirror sunglasses. She happened to misplace them at the party.
So the Monday after the party she sent an email to her group explaining the situation and asking for everyone to look for them. We were on Lotus Notes and she accidentally chose * (iirc) instead of her groups distribution list. So 30,000 people across the world got the email.
The funny part is that every smart ass in the company decided to have fun with it. Reply alls started flooding the network with messages such as "Looked in my office in Germany and can't find them", "Not in Wisconsin office", and "Didn't find them but did find handcuffs, you want those?". Went on for hours and basically took the email system down for 2 days.
The worst part is that they had a few of the servers mis-configured or something because anyone who had an auto out of office reply would respond to all with that message, which would then trigger the other out of office replies again.
Everyone spent a really long time removing tens of thousands of emails from their mailboxes.
I'd say (Score:5, Funny)
...email was God's gift to business. Transformative, empowering, a paradigm-shift.
It's Satan that added Reply-all, and then BCC just to continue the general fuckery.
Re:I'd say (Score:5, Informative)
But bcc prevents this entire problem. If you send a message to a large distribution you should always use bcc. Then when some retard hits reply-to-all the reply is only directed to the original sender rather than the entire distribution list.
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That's a *bad* server config!
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But bcc prevents this entire problem. If you send a message to a large distribution you should always use bcc. Then when some retard hits reply-to-all the reply is only directed to the original sender rather than the entire distribution list.
Yes and no. If you are sending a message to a large (or even small) group of addresses, using BCC prevents everyone from seeing everyone else's addresses, and thus prevents the "reply-all" troubles.
For a mailing list system however, any message sent by chris@some-company.com to everyone@some-company.com gets sent to everyone on the list. The system may or may not be set to deliver those messages with a return address of chris@some-company.com or of everyone@some-company.com or something else, regardless of
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There is also a limit (in kb, not the number of addresses) in a To: or CC: field. But I guess if you are sending mail to a listserv or alias that points to multiple addresses then that doesn't even kick in.
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If you send a message to a large distribution you should always use bcc.
If you mistakenly send the email in the first place chances are you weren't hovering over the BCC field making this point irrelevant.
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-1, pointless attempt to sound superior
Advising people to use BCC is only relevant to cases where the initial long recipient list is *intentional*. In this case the initial email was accidentally sent.
Really? (Score:2)
Most MUAs won't accept To/CC/BCC of unlimited length.
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Certainly it's using distribution list(s).
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Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Which requires an Emergency Change Request (which takes hours to get approved for a Sev 2).
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Nothing is simple when you have an "Enterprise" IT. (This means it takes as long to get anything changed as it would take you to manually shift the starship Enterprise by pushing with your hands.)
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If so, I can't believe they allow just anyone to post to it. That's insane.
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It doesn't have to be of unlimited length. In Outlook/Exchange, at least, it's possible to have a distribution group that is handled by the server, so including the group name in the To: (or CC: or BCC:) field will send it to everyone in that group, no matter how big. My organization has a #Everyone group that does actually go to everyone. I don't know if #Everyone is protected, but there are certainly some very large distribution groups- around 1/3 of the organization- that anyone is allowed to send to.
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all@company.com isn't very long.
Dilbert (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatory Dilbert:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2003-04-06
About 1% of employees are this dumb (Score:2)
I seriously doubt that only 120 people in the NHS have hit reply all. My guess is that there will eventually be a few thousand who do this. That's assuming the NHS has above average intelligence employees.
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My guess is that 120 people hit reply all before they were able to disable the group.
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tbh it makes fo
So common... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So common... (Score:5, Insightful)
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This. I believe the correct technical solution would be to limit who is allowed to email large numbers of people and the top level groups. Their should be no possible way for the intern to email every one of your million plus employees (or really even any more than 10-20). And it would be really great for the original sender to indicate the default behavior (aka, do I want to make this a conference email, or was I just sending instructions to everyone individually.)
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No, the correct response is to use a mailing list, and if you are concerned with interns sending 1.2 million people cat pictures, restrict who can use it. This has been the correct way to handle this for at about 20 years. There is never any excuse for allowing a message to be sent to 1.2 million discrete addresses. Ever.
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No, the correct response is to a) correctly configure the mail server to reject any message addressed to more than a reasonable number of people, say, 100 (or even less), and b) use mailing lists for mass messages, like people with a normal IQ.
Whoever runs their mail server should be driven out of the profession and put in a home for the mentally impaired.
Classic (Score:3)
The simple solution is to lock down the "all" distribution list so only certain (very few) senders can send mail to it. I am not sure why this would not have been done... I am actually surprised that this hasn't happened before if everyone has send access to this list....
If course, if the distribution list was enumerated on the client prior to sending, that is a different story. But I can't imagine any client that would work reasonably with a million individual recipients.
It is useful heuristic (Score:5, Informative)
I have seen it few times in big corporations I worked in. Somebody sends email to wrong group by accident and then we have 3 waves of attack:
1) Clueless people hitting 'reply all' asking for removal from mailing group
2) Even more clueless people hitting 'reply all' asking people to not 'reply all'
3) "Champions" trying to save a day by putting all in BCC and telling people to not reply all, unless you put it in BCC [1]
And then, few hours later, next timezone wakes up and things start again.
Why is it useful? After it is obvious what is happening, you create folder called 'idiots' and redirect all these emails into that group by outlook/whatever rule. After that, if you need to deal with somebody in your organization, first check if he/she is in idiots folder and approach accordingly.
BTW, 120 replies seems very low. I have seen mailstorms with group of 10k recipients (it was not 'all' group, just some subset of company) generate over 600 replies total in these 3 waves. 120 replies from 1.2 million looks to be technical limitation (or, maybe, there was some hero in IT department who pulled the plug fast enough...)
[1] - My favorite is self correcting champion, which first sends 'reply all' and then does reply to that with everybody in BCC saying he should have put everybody in BCC in first place...
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After it is obvious what is happening, you create folder called 'idiots' and redirect all these emails into that group by outlook/whatever rule.
When I worked at Cisco back in the early 2Ks, we had reply-all storms every few months. Everyone joked that perpetuating them was the best way to get onto the "bottom 5%" list.
This gets expensive... (Score:5, Funny)
The importance of BCC (Score:2)
And this highlights one of the many uses of BCC
this has happened many times at Northrop Grumman (Score:5, Funny)
i worked at NG for 7 years, and there were several instances (the last one being in 2010) where email system company-wide was crippled or knocked offline by an email that was sent to the wrong mailing list. apparently, there was one available that included literally every single person in the system (probably about 100,000 people).
i remember one morning in about 2008 or so, getting an email addressed to some team i wasn't a part of, seeing the "CC" list was several miles long, and i knew instantly what was going to happen. i guess the "first post" instinct in me acted up for the first time ever. i knew we were all already doomed, so i hit reply-all and simply posted: "oh no, not again." i did manage to be first, but before i could blink, i had over a thousand new emails all saying some variation of "WHAT IS THIS?" "REMOVE ME FROM THIS LIST" and "STOP REPLYING FOR GODS SAKE". my new emails hit 30,000 in a few minutes.
the entire NG email system was down for more than a day.
two days later i got called into my boss's office and he explained that top-tier management at NG had demanded that i be fired. my "oh no not again" was the last email most people saw before the system exploded. a very heated conversation between my supervisors and NG executives apparently just barely saved my job, but my supervisors were not pleased either and mentioned this would go on my permanent record (i thought that was just a high school thing). it didn't matter that i didn't actually do anything to cause the crash. i had merely made myself visible at the wrong time, and NG wanted someone's head.
so glad i don't work there now.
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Probably because the CTO knew that it is his head that should roll since the email system that allowed such fuckery happened on his watch.
Got to find a low level scapegoat.
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Back in I think 1996, when I was in the Air Force, a contractor sent to everybody on base the dancing baby animation. I think it was several megabytes in size. Nobody even had to reply to it for the mail system to crash.
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yeah, when i was at Vicenza, Italy in the US Army around this time we did the same thing. only we did it on purpose to try to crash the email system
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this is why i simply ignore these emails
a lot simpler than getting outraged and emailing everyone to be taken off
Saw this at McKesson (Score:2)
And only a small division with a thousand or so employees.
There had to be threats of discipline from upper management to get it to stop.
It could be worse (Score:5, Informative)
I get an email for a division-wide thing.
I get a copy from my VP's admin, specifically targeting my team in case we weren't on the original distribution list.
I get a copy of this from my manager, since he doesn't want me to miss this.
I also get a copy of the original from a corporate level special interest group I'm part of.
Then I get a copy from a former team member. Just in case I was left of their distribution, since they left our team but believe they may be getting team emails that current team members are not.
And a copy from their manager, with a note to be sure the distribution list I cannot administer is properly updated to get these mails from the list they should not be and indeed are not part of. Just in case.
Then I get a copy from an interested team leader who wants to make sure we are in the loop.
And another from their #1 team member, who looks out for us.
And finally my cubicle mate leans over and tell me 'hey, did you get the email from......'
And so I have a 14GB .OST that i cannot backup locally due to GPO. and i get warnings occasionally that my file will be groomed back to an unspecified maximum size. Some day, real soon now. Right after they encrypt my files for no apparent reason, in accordance with some policy I cannot get a copy of.
I'm not bitter, really. I feel for the corporate security and cloud services guys. They can't fix stupid.
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Did you get a copy of the memo about the new TPS report coversheets?
Email Client (Score:2)
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Distribution lists are expanded on the server side. Your client's not going to explode if you send an email to all.users@nhs.uk (or whatever). The server, on the other hand...
Was a distribution list used here? If that was the case, the IT department could have just shut down the list and problem solved.
Server Admin Needs to be Fired (Score:2)
Unless of course management caught a bad case of the dumbass and forced the admins to leave that setting on. In which case the managers should be fired.
NHS Who? (Score:3)
If /. was a British site I would assume the UK Govt health service, but its American, and the first thing that came up when I googled was National Honor Society
Theres also quite a few schools using that TLA and the National Highway System
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Simple solution you idiots (Score:3)
subscribe mailinglist to itself (Score:3)
Another classic in big companies (and has happened several times at one I worked for) is people trying to send an e-mail to a department in the company like HR, finding a list named something like "HR_Dallas" in the global address listing not knowing this is not the HR Dallas department but rather the list that sends an e-mail to all Dallas employees. Yep, you just send your private confidential mail to all the employees
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Mailman has a "Pause all mailing lists" button for flame wars.
Re:Good ol' fun (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but you see, Mailman is an old-fashioned piece of software for an operating system that comes from the '70's.
Modern, advanced software from Microsoft (tm) will ensure emails will be delivered to everybody, under every circumstance.
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they have ...
https://www.theguardian.com/so... [theguardian.com]
still will take time though
IT contractors eh!
Re:Good ol' fun (Score:5, Interesting)
Emailing a group like that should have been limited to a very small number of people. Everyone else should have got a message that they were not authorized to use that email message.
This is email server admin 101 level knowledge.
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This only applies to places big enough to have an "email server admin". In a lot of small shops, there is only one IT guy doing all the work from installing ethernet cables, helping users configure their OS and programs, setting up WordPress and email accounts. He can't know everything on all subjects.
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They have 1.2 million users. That's big enough to have an "email server admin." In fact, it's big enough to have two. They should get some. Not having any hasn't worked out too well for them.
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They should send out an email to everyone advising them not to reply.... Oh and don't reply to this one either or we might be forced to send another in a similar vain.
Sending messages in a similar vein [macmillandictionary.com] would be in vain [thefreedictionary.com].
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They would have saved money (read: time) at this point if they just distributed memoranda on paper.
To err is human.
To really fuck up requires a computer.
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Or so those of us that pay for it are lead to believe.
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"Having used the NHS in the UK, and the US medical system, I can unequivocally say ..."
Who cares, anecdote dude.
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Fucking annoying. Had to change my email address because of those whiny shits.
You could have unsubscribed. No need to play the victim game.
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If you've successfully unsubscribed, you need to share your method with the world.
Scroll down to the bottom of the email, click on the unsubscribe link, and follow the directions on the webpage. That simple.
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In defense of the people who have put a conference call "on hold" with music on hold, it is not always immediately obvious to the users of the phone system that music on hold exists, or if it exists, that the phone system isn't smart enough to know that it shouldn't be played to a conference call. And I say this as someone who was the administrator of a small company phone system (100 seats), not as someone who has committed the sin of placing a conference call on hold with "music on hold" myself. I don't