Thank you for wasting our valuable time.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Why is it that a significant chunk of our internal mailbox, helpdesk-address@internal-org, is filled with mail of this form:



Fred: Hey Bob, you have to send email to completely-unrelated-address@internal-org about X, Y and Z.

Bob: OK!


...no, that's it. That's all we get. No, I don't know why, either. But I do have an email template now that says "You have sent mail to the wrong address. Please try sending it to the address you were told to. Thank you for wasting our valuable time. You suck."

Comments

[benatwork.livejournal.com]

We've had that happen at work several times now..

Wy the hell do people obsessively use the 'reply all' button? You're only responding to one person, the rest of them don't need to know or care!

Yeesh.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

We damped most of that by having any message of >15 recipients generate a dialogue box saying "You are sending this message to N people! This may cause your office email server to slow down, email to be delayed etc etc", and they have to type their username in as 'authorisation' "which will be recorded against your name" to send it. Doesn't block determined users, but it does slow them down a lot and make them jump through hoops to get their result. It also helps that the "Reply to All" option isn't a button, but a menu choice on a drop-down list.

Additionally, the All-Staff list (25K staff) is blocked to everyone except the head of the email team (who has to use a separate, specialist ID to access it) - even the regular CxO spam must be vetted and the message generation staggered to avoid bringing down the WAN.

Of course, this doesn't stop people trying to synchronise 2G mailboxes over dialup.