Don’t Reply All Rant

Don’t hit reply all. Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!

I’d like to tell you to never use reply all, but there may be legitimate reasons to reply all even if I can’t think of any of them. So consider my thesis to be: don’t use reply all ever!

While there may be a few times when replying to all is appropriate, I hereby give you permission to mess up by failing to reply all rather than replying to all inappropriately, which is far more likely.

It is like using effect as a verb. There are times when it is correct, but this occurs so rarely that using affect all the time is far less likely to get you in trouble. Reply all has that effect (which is not using effect as a verb).

Reply to the sender of the email only. S/he is the person who started the conversation in the first place. If the sender asks a question of ten people and they all hit reply all, you now have ten emails – and a possible reply from the sender to make number eleven. Just what you want - more emails!

What if each person sent a reply back to the sender and the sender sent a summary? Instead of ten emails, you have one. One. Only one. One that it is relevant to you. Do I really need to know that you can’t make the meeting because your daughter is getting her ears pierced or you are bringing gluten free doughnuts?

I know that some people can’t help themselves. Some are using phones with buttons so small that they hit the wrong choice. Some still get confused by the options. Some don’t understand the difference between reply and reply all. Some really want me to know that their spouse has strep.

There is an easy solution to this problem: When sending an email to a group of people, put the addresses in the BCC field. BCC stands for blind carbon copy. This means that those who receive the email cannot see the list of recipients, no matter how long. Putting the recipient list in the BCC field not only protects their privacy but also makes the email easier to read because it will not have the long list of addresses at the beginning, which is especially nice for those reading it on tiny screens. It also prevents anyone from using this list for other purposes. I love that people feel free to share my email address with large numbers of strangers.

If the long list is in the BCC field, the only person who will receive a reply is the sender, no matter how befuddled the recipient may be. No one’s email is shared at all! Problem solved.

Don’t use reply all. When sending emails to groups, put the list in the BCC field. Yes, you can leave the TO or CC fields blank, it will still send.

I will have to compose myself to write about group text messages, but we'll save that for another time. 

End of rant.