The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-all' email hell

http://uk.businessinsider.com/reply-all-email-chain-1-2-million-nhs-employees-2016-11?r=US&IR=T

by agjmills • 10 years ago

159 141 10 years ago

uk.businessinsider.com

This reminds me of the story Larry Osterman told about Bedlam DL3 [0] at Microsoft. I feel like this is a problem with few good, problem-free technical solutions.

[0] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2004/04/08/me-t...

johansch4• 10 years ago

"Do you really want to send this e-mail to 1,000,000 people?

[Yes, really] [No]"

With the latter option being focused by default and emphasized?

Yes, doing that is tricky deployment-wise with open protocols, but isn't the whole point of solutions like Exchange to enable system-wide shortcuts like that?

With an open solution the next best option is probably to have the mail server send a confirmation request email back to the user with a link to click if they really wanted to send it, instructions on how to reply with a confirmation etc.

CydeWeys• 10 years ago

It shouldn't even be an option for the vast majority of employees. Rather than their email being a binary permission (you either can or cannot send to members of the domain), it should have more access levels, including a higher access level "can send to MANY members of the domain" that would not be granted to most employees. Most employees would be in the middle tier, which would allow emails sent only up to some number of manageable recipients. And of course the big distribution lists that go to large numbers of employees should be configured so that only a small number of accounts can post to them.

ChuckMcM2• 10 years ago

At Google they had modified gmail at one point to take an email that was going to go to a lot of people and send it to your manager for approval. That worked pretty well. I believe the data indicated that sending it to anyone else for them to sign off on it helped. You could override a disapproval and send it anyway but that essentially created a willful act that later could be used as part of the reasoning behind your dismissal :-)

ejdyksen• 10 years ago

This feature exists in Exchange! It's called MailTips. It warns senders in Outlook and Outlook Web App before sending of a number of conditions (including sending to a "large audience").

I was the PM who owned MailTips when it was created/introduced, and our research at the time showed it would be effective for preventing reply-all storms.

Implementing this is, of course, harder than you think. The size of groups has to be calculated nightly and distributed to every server, since groups can be nested (and have duplicate recipients).

brown9-2• 10 years ago

Gmail's mute feature is a pretty good countermeasure for this sort of thing, at least at an individual level.

corecoder2• 10 years ago

I just had to stop reading, the bad math was too bad (a quarter of 100000 is 13000, then it becomes briefly 25000 and goes back to 13000, and 10% of 13000 is 130...)

megablast• 10 years ago

There were 55,000 people, but 100,000 mailboxes.

1/4 of 55,000 = 13,0000.

That seems to have been where the writer got confused.

dingaling• 10 years ago

120 replies ( as of lunchtime ) out of 1.2 million recipients is a remarkably low ratio for a non-technology-focused organisation.

Looks like there are lot of sensible folk in the NHS, or else they haven't yet all had a chance to check their e-mails between shifts...

pavel_lishin3• 10 years ago

I wonder how many emails per day the system usually handles; I would say I probably receive on the order of 100 emails a day (although most of those are automated messages) and probably send half a dozen, and I'm definitely on the low end.

mikeash• 10 years ago

I wonder if most employees lack the needed permission to send an e-mail to 1.2 million recipients. It seems like a smart thing to restrict that kind of action, precisely to avoid havoc.

Another possibility is that dealing with messages that have 1.2 million recipients so overloads the system that it it has only been able to deliver 120 of them so far.

pliu• 10 years ago

It's been quite a few years since I was last an Exchange administrator, but I seem to recall that you could secure a distribution list such that only authorized members could send mail to it. Perhaps (hopefully) only a relatively small group at NHS are allowed to mail all 1.2M mailboxes, and within that group there are 120 very silly people.

mfoy_• 10 years ago

Something like this seems to happen, and make the news, every couple years...

Is it not possible to configure their email server to disallow emails with over X recipients from sending?

gregmac• 10 years ago

It's probably a list, so the actual email has only one recipient. Something essentially expands this list to deliver a separate message to each individual recipient.

pavel_lishin3• 10 years ago

I'm surprised that lists of certain sizes aren't locked down.

I would expect the server to refuse to send to "all@nhs.gov.uk" unless the sender is on some sort of pre-approved list.

frandroid• 10 years ago

If it was a list, the list owner would have disabled posting to it by now.

_ao789• 10 years ago

Sounds like a DL Group to me..

sjcsjc• 10 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm

arethuza2• 10 years ago

You can tell they aren't very close to it a they refer to "the" NHS - there are actually four NHSs for different parts of the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service

djmobley• 10 years ago

Pretty much everyone in the UK refers to the organization(s) as "the NHS"

wlll• 10 years ago

Can confirm. It's just "the NHS" wherever you are.

bcraven2• 10 years ago

From your own link:

The terms "National Health Service" or "NHS" are also used to refer to the four systems collectively.

arethuza2• 10 years ago

What I meant was which of the four NHSs (which have a lot of different infrastructure) does this apply to? Or to all four - which in itself would be interesting.

jameshart• 10 years ago

For context, the NHS is one of the largest employers in the world. The list[1] currently goes:

- US Department of Defense

- The Chinese Army

- Walmart

- McDonalds

- The NHS

And The NHS's staff are all far more likely to actually have to use a computer and email in their day-to-day work than most of those Walmart and McDonalds employees.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers

tedmiston• 10 years ago

As an anecdote, having worked as a contractor for the DoD, the amount of mail received (internally) that is not relevant to your actual work or job is somewhat astronomical, 90–95% for me. There are many, many lists, warnings, notices, digests, alerts, etc.

jff• 10 years ago

We sometimes get situations where there's a semi-important note in a daily newsletter, and the group secretary decides to copy-paste it in an email to the whole group. Then the level 1 manager doesn't look at the To: line and forwards it to the whole group again. Then our level 2 manager gets the same information from someone else and forwards it to the entire group as well. I'll get the exact same information about today's health and wellness walk or whatever upwards of 3-4 times.

Thriptic2• 10 years ago

Having done some affiliate work with the VA, I can confirm that this is indeed the case.

bradleyjg2• 10 years ago

McDonalds doesn't really belong on the list as they include employees of franchises. Or if does than there are some other organizations that belong on the list as well -- such as the Roman Catholic Church.

mschuster91• 10 years ago

such as the Roman Catholic Church.

The RCC does not provide a world- or even countrywide emailing system for clergy people, maybe except the Vatican. I did a little gig for a church group once, chances are high that most of them are technically illiterate and are happy if some dude like me throws 'em a Wordpress template and a (back in the days) free Google Apps mail account.

tn13• 10 years ago

But it is fair comparison here as they might end up using the same technological infrastructure unlike the Church.

Indian Railways is another large employer with unique technology problems.

digler9993• 10 years ago

why does the accounting designation of a "franchise" imply the employee shouldn't be counted ? They wear a uniform that says McDonalds, they show up 40+ hrs/week at a building that has "McDonalds" written on it. The product they sell has McDonalds written everywhere on it. Advertisements say "go to McDonalds", not "Go to your nearest McDonalds Franchise". What makes them not an employee of McDonalds ?

rflrob• 10 years ago

It looks to me (based on outdated statistics [1]) that the Roman Catholic Church would come in at the bottom of the list, with "just under a million". If you can find better statistics, Wikipedia has a handy "edit" button for you to use!

[1]http://www.tldm.org/News11/DevastatingDeclineReligiousOrders...

kazinator• 10 years ago

NHS is one of the largest employers in the world.

Yet nobody can be found in that entire throng who can command an e-mail server into putting a swift end to a runaway thread.

econnors• 10 years ago

I think the iOS "unsubscribe" banner could be adding to the chaos. Not sure about this exact situation, but I've been caught in mailing lists where people instinctually hit the unsubscribe prompt which just sends an email with text saying "unsubscribe", therefor blasting everyone in the thread and not actually unsubscribing them.

mcintyre1994• 10 years ago

It does that as a reply all? Do you have any idea why it does that?

EDIT: Maybe it's a mailing list so there's just one address.

JoshTriplett2• 10 years ago

That should only happen for lists that have a List-Unsubscribe header. If the iOS mail client does that for arbitrary mails, that seems horribly broken.

stymaar2• 10 years ago

Pro tip to escape this kind of situation : reply to the last email but spoof a fake email address as sender. Now, for everybody who's gonna use the last email to reply (your email then) your email address doesn't appear anywhere.

You might need to repeat this process a few times since people don't always reply to your email, but it works pretty well.

bcraven2• 10 years ago

You might need to repeat this process a few times

You're suggesting adding millions of extra emails to the system here. I think the best thing to do is wait, or create a rule based on the subject line.

stymaar2• 10 years ago

In this very specific context, your are absolutely right since the main problem is not the little annoyance experimented by the email receivers, but the global overloading of the mailing infrastructure.

But this is a really exceptionnel situation, while being trapped in a reply-to-all loop is not that uncommon.

hitgeek• 10 years ago

I was caught in an email storm like this one time. Someone at a large insurance company accidentally sent an email containing a few patient names/dobs to a group-email mailing list of at least 1000+ outside emails.

It took about 2 months before the storm finally ended.

It became comical how many responders to the email chastised the original sender for "HIPAA violations" using Reply-All thereby inadvertently committing the same infraction themselves because the original email was included at the bottom of the reply.

Also, several times, after 2-3 days of quiet, someone would come back from vacation and reply-all with "I think you sent this to the wrong person", thereby starting the storm all over again.

The company of the original sender seemed powerless to stop it, but I always wondered if they could have just disabled/deleted that group-email mailing list.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 10 years ago

Easy to do if there are no permissions or anything else tied to that AD group - but that is often not the case in these kinds of situations.

brazzledazzle4• 10 years ago

Easy enough to setup an authorized senders list. Really any group with a significant number of recipients should have that or failing that some way for a user to remove themselves.

yagyu• 10 years ago

I just moved to the outlook webmail in a large-ish organization. It surprised me that Reply All is the default reply-button, and a regular reply requires expanding a drop down! The ui really encourages the mistake.

JoshTriplett2• 10 years ago

For mails not sent to millions of people, Reply All is the correct default; anyone receiving the original mail should normally see the reply, and narrowing the communication to a subset of people should require thought (and often an explanation).

To help avoid this situation, when sending emails to a large number of people (or a list that goes to a large number of people), if you know that responses should not go to that same set of people, use BCC.

Too2• 10 years ago

There is no correct default, show both buttons next to each other with the same size! Now you have to open a tiny drop down to get to normal reply, it's very easy to forget that there is another option there just replying to all without thinking.

matt_wulfeck• 10 years ago

Probably because "reply-all" is almost always the preferred method of response when responding to a group email.

xyzzy4• 10 years ago

This used to happen all the time when I worked at Cisco... and yes most emails were of the variety "please remove me from this list".

tintor• 10 years ago

... or (if using gmail) just mute the conversation.

elcct• 10 years ago

I was caught in 'reply-all' email hell, but not at such scale. It was with about 5000 users. It was hilarious actually, but I can imagine a lot of people will find this annoying.

mkmk• 10 years ago

Reminds me of this very funny story shared on Metafilter...

(if the comment permalink doesn't work, please search for "Reply-All can get even more fun when")

http://www.metafilter.com/78177/PLEASE-UNSUBSCRIBE-ME-FROM-T...

smcl• 10 years ago

The advice at the end is pretty important - if you want the thread to die, just ignore it. All told people mostly followed this, and if only 120 replies were sent in an organisation as huge as the NHS then that's pretty incredible. In our company's "social" list the silly reply-all chains have a very predictable pattern, coming in a series of waves:

1. original sensible email like "hey guys, I have some honey/walnuts/fruit/spirits from my hometown if anyone wants to try/buy"

2. sensible replies start rolling in, but which were accidentally sent to all

3. some jokers/trolls send memes in response (also reply all)

4. the whining begins, people reply-all asking everyone to stop spamming them

5. the memers reply (sometimes with more memes) that it is the optional "social" list that's for this sort of nonserious/fun stuff.

6. some helpful problem-solvers weigh in, sending reply-all instructions (often including MS Paint'd diagrams) on how to unsubscribe from the list or apply an outlook filter

7. finally the "can everyone just stop replying to this though?" emails start, also reply-all (and apparently oblivious to the contradiction/irony of their own reply-all) and everyone participating starts to realise it should be ignored...

Once you recognise the pattern it becomes pretty enjoyable identifying which stage of this month's "Emailgate" you're currently at - the whole thing can around to 45-60 mins to play out.

cgvgffyv• 10 years ago

If anyone working on Office 365 OWA is about, please make the Ignore button front and center if the To is a mailing list.

One can right click and then Ignore the thread, but presumably nobody is aware of this or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

randlet• 10 years ago

In my experience watching lay people use computers, they almost never consider right clicking.

semi-extrinsic2• 10 years ago

You assume there is anyone working on Office 365 OWA who is doing anything but the mandatory re-skinning whenever MSFT rebrands their Office/cloud offerings yet again.

But evidence points to the contrary; to wit, they have yet to implement S/MIME signed email in anything but an incredibly useless way: the email is not displayed, but a link says "This is not supported in the current view, please click here", and when you click it a popup (Yes! A real 1997 era popup! That your browser will complain about and induces even more clicks! OWA loves them!) appears that displays the actual message but fails to verify the signature.

branchless4• 10 years ago

One of my favourite days at work in a large bank was when someone sent a boring email to the wrong list. It was a big list. A few people replied all saying "can you remove me from this list please". Then more people replied saying "can you please stop replying all on this thread". Then people said "can you remove me from this list please" again replying all.

The mail servers slowed to a crawl. We had thousands of emails. It began at 9am GMT. Eventually after about 3 or so hours everything calmed down and we could send mail again, albeit with a large delay.

Around 12:30 the US workers began coming in, openend outlook and saw all the emails. And instead of scrolling down they sent an email, reply all "could you remove me from this list". Again people replied "stop replying all" on reply all. We were up and running again! Mail was down for the rest of the day.

The next day some people who were off the day before came in and there was again a brief storm, but sadly this one only lasted around 30 minutes.

One of the biggest banks. Lasted a whole day. We christened it "moron storm".

Symbiote• 10 years ago

Shouldn't these be straightforward to block, by matching on the References header? That contains the message id of previous messages.

brazzledazzle4• 10 years ago

Since these are so trivial to halt and blow away everything in the queue from the thread I can only imagine the sysadmins in charge of these mail systems are letting it continue for comedic effect. That or they have to jump through weeks of change control hoops so letting it play out is faster.

desas3• 10 years ago

Morgan Stanley?

TranceMan• 10 years ago

Could it be only 120 people got to send a reply as others could not access the system once the replies started coming in, 120 x 1.2M is a big number.

viraptor• 10 years ago

120 x 1.2M + read receipts. They had it turned on.

jordache• 10 years ago

8.Someone high up the food chain steps in with a strongly worded email to stop replying. A brief moment of calm ensues 9.Some smart jack replies all - "I'll try to do that"

JimboOmega• 10 years ago

That's ignoring the stage of "please take me off this list" - which, in my opinion, makes it a lot worse since then people suddenly feel like they CAN do something, namely, ask to be taken off the list.

This is especially compounded when it's a list that never has anything you want on it anyway - say it's some sort of distro that is usually used for the corporate newsletter.

Hilarious to watch I must say.

ptaipale• 10 years ago

A good trolling in this respect used to be a single-word reply "unsubscribe".

However, it might not work any more, as people are no longer familiar with Majordomo mailing lists.

semi-extrinsic2• 10 years ago

The best one I've been in was a scientific conference mailing list where the first email sent out instructed users to reply with "Unsubscribe" if they wanted off the list, but the reply-to address was set to the post-to-list address. So ordinary replies were converted into reply-to-all. Hilarity ensued.

cmgreen• 10 years ago

I'm surprised they don't have a cap on number of recipients. That is often a problem orgs had to deal with around holiday time.

nneonneo• 10 years ago

From the BBCs coverage (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/37979456), it seems like the problem was caused by a contractor setting up a full-org distribution list by mistake. This DL would have appeared as a single (unfamiliar) email address to most recipients, making it less obvious that "reply-all" would actually send a message to a million receipients.

The NHS resolved the issue by killing the offending DL reasonably quickly, which would stop further replies from being generated. This is also the reason why only about a hundred folks (out of a million) replied-all to the message.

OskarS• 10 years ago

Man, i have such sympathy for that nameless engineer whose fault it was. I know exactly the fight-or-flight-like feeling of "oh shit, I fucked up!", even though I've never fucked up on this massive scale.

nthcolumn• 10 years ago

Not the contractors fault at all! People make mistakes. If your design depends on user vigilance then its YOUR fault. People make mistakes! A single 'rogue' should not be able to take down the entire show just by sending an email. The problem was exacerbated mainly the software being used made by Microsoft - a fairly ubiquitous but non-standard, proprietary system. It has no place in a public entity like the NHS. Sack the highly paid idiots who procured it at great expense over cheaper and higher quality alternatives instead.

blauditore• 10 years ago

I received such a mail from Microsoft a few years back. It was something related to WP/W8 development with thousands or tens of thousands (IIRC) of email addresses in the "to" field, so probably all registered app devs. I tried to send a witty response, but my mail server (ironically on outlook.com) refused to do it.

jessaustin• 10 years ago

Publicly revealing all those addresses in the "To:" could be considered really abusive. That's a screw-up above and beyond the spamming.

rickette• 10 years ago

I assume all mails run over NHS controlled mailservers. Some administrator could just step up and kill/block the email thread, right? Shouldn't be that hard of a problem...

desus3• 10 years ago

That's exactly what they did. "The distribution list has been removed and associated emails are being traced and cleared." See http://support.nhs.net/servicestatus

eggie5• 10 years ago

This happened at Qualcomm once. I think it was an IT email too. It went out to most of the corp and what really started the issue was people's vacation/out-of-office auto-reply-all messages -- those really started magnifying problem. Then people started making it even worse by reply-all sending "remove me from this list!" etc. The most funny messages were the reply-all that said "Stop sending reply all to the whole list!" It lasted most of the day...

corecoder2• 10 years ago

By the way, does anybody know of a valid reason why vacation/out-of-office messages shouldn't be forbidden forever? Has any organization ever had any positive outcome whatsoever from their members having those autoreplies?

golemotron• 10 years ago

This might be the most clever Denial of Service Attack ever devised.

DonHopkins• 10 years ago

Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.

So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.

It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...

...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:

http://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard

jplahn• 10 years ago

Ah. This reminds me of a great story in Amazon of a conference room booking email gone wrong. The email was inadvertently sent to the entire company, so that employees in Japan, China, Scotland, France, etc. all knew of this fabled booking. At its peak over 280k emails were being delivered throughout the company.

Also good to remember: replying UNSUBSCRIBE to an email list is typically not how you go about it.

wutbrodo3• 10 years ago

I remember this happening at Google, but I'm not sure if it was the entire company or just something like eng-announce. I myself once had the wrong CL # on my clipboard and attached a random CL of mine to a bug that Jeff Dean had opened about a development tool used by every engineer (with very active discussion across the engineer on the bug). I don't remember these incidents being treated with anything but mild amusement, certainly not "email hell". This probably has something to do with the fact that GMail makes it pretty easy to block an email thread.

nkrisc• 10 years ago

I was once part of a ~20k person reply-all chain. After a while I sent an email to each person who sent yet another reply-all asking to be removed an individual email explaining how dumb they were, in the nicest, most professionally appropriate way possible. None of them replied to me.

iamatworknow• 10 years ago

When I was in college e-mail was everything. Facebook was only just getting off the ground, so when an event was happening or a club was recruiting the best way to get the word out was to send an e-mail to the listserv, which then sent it to specific class years or to the whole campus.

Problem was this listserv wasn't moderated at all. Any club president or anyone else who wanted access could get it, and the messages weren't screened for content before being distributed to every e-mail address on the list.

One such club president wrote an e-mail to the ex of his current girl that began, "Me and Jessica fucked like rabbits..." and he accidentally included the listserv address for the entire campus on that e-mail. The guy was generally well known as an active student with great grades who didn't get in trouble, so when a catty lovers quarrel was made public to thousands of students and faculty by his own hand it was kinda entertaining.

cs02rm0• 10 years ago

My wife works for the NHS so I had a quick look at her inbox (as it were).

Thoroughly disappointing. Normally when I see this happen it's at relatively IT-literate organisations. The NHS emails all seem to be single replies to the original email asking to be removed / saying it seems to be sent in error.

I say disappointing because I didn't see any threads spiralling off into back-and-forth between people asking others to stop replying or anyone trolling others.

Such a waste.

enraged_camel• 10 years ago

Email clients need a way to remove the "reply-all" button. That way, users are forced to manually enter the emails of people other than the sender, which would make them think about who actually needs to be copied.

Spooky23• 10 years ago

It's amazing to me that Microsoft never fixed this issue with Exchange.

There are a few edge cases like this where users with no ill intent can do lots of damage. Strong procedural controls are really the only defense.

jlebrech• 10 years ago

surely the exchange server can block reply alls that have too many recipients, or maybe mute people who've already chipped in for 24hrs.

namesbc• 10 years ago

How about responding to the list with everyone on BCC stating "You have been unsubscribed."

j45• 10 years ago

It's a little odd that this has received media attention.

What I'd do: independently of the email, ask for a procedure to be sent out to create an email filter/rule. Wouldn't take more than 1-2 minutes to complete for each end user.

giarc• 10 years ago

I work for a large organization and this happens once or twice a year. I find that when speaking with people, no one knows what BCC is for. Many of these would be avoided if people used BCC properly.

whack• 10 years ago

It's amusing how many people continue to suffer from a solved problem. Any email system that resembles Gmail in its most basic form, won't have any such problems. 100 people replying-all to the same email? Oh hey, they are all lumped together into a single thread which you can easily ignore. Don't want to see any more emails from that thread? Oh hey, you can just hit the mute button on that thread, and you will never see any more emails there.

It boggles my mind how many people and organizations continue to use outdated crappy systems when vastly superior alternatives have been publicly available for over a decade.

lmm• 10 years ago

We're talking about a European organization that handles people's most sensitive personal data - shipping that to the US to be scanned by Google and the NSA is not an option.

eru2• 10 years ago

OP didn't talk about using gmail. Only about copying gmail's features.

dpark• 10 years ago

Outlook supports threading and "ignore". This still happens. If you put a few thousand users in Gmail for work (or whatever they call it), it'll happen there, too. Because it's easier to reply all than to think the issue through, remember that ignore is an option, and use it.

theandrewbailey• 10 years ago

Better software would not have helped in this situation. Most employees in non-technical organizations are (guess what?) non-technical. Most want to do duties reflective of their job title, and by and large, view computers and software as tools, and not things to be known or studied.

sandworm101• 10 years ago

> 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."

Is this 1994? That isn't my definition of email hell. 100 useless emails in my inbox is a bad day, but it certainly isn't a hellish one. And 140 million emails shouldn't slow anything down. That;s a drop in the spam bucket for any organization the size of the NHS.

jessewmc• 10 years ago

Tangent: I found 1.4M to 1.7M employees for NHS on google. 64.1M people in the UK, 31.42M employed.

1.4M / 31.42M = 4.5% of the entire UK workforce works for NHS? Is this a normal distribution for a developed country?

martinald• 10 years ago

How many people are employed in the US in healthcare? I would guess way more (10%? 20%?)

We spend about 7% of GDP on the NHS. So it's about right that number.

sockmeistr• 10 years ago

Approximately 9% of US workers are in healthcare. (http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/health-care-employment-...)

The UK does have a private healthcare sector, although smaller than the NHS.

todd8• 10 years ago

I once went to a crowed midnight movie showing of the 1950's "It Came From Outerspace". The crowd seemed quite intoxicated and so I missed the first 40 minutes of the movie's dialog because every few seconds someone would stand up and yell SHUT UP and then someone else would yell back from the other side of the theater NO YOU SHUT UP.

It was terrible and amusing at the same time.

teddyh• 10 years ago

Ornk!

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-sea-lions

darkr• 10 years ago

This is why you should access controls on configure large mail groups. I thought this was pretty standard at large organisations. A select few people can actually send to a given group, but anyone else will just receive a bounceback.

Thriptic2• 10 years ago

gg no re?

The NHS's 1.2M employees are trapped in a 'reply-all' email hell

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