James's Weblog

We’ve had a problem at work where people habitually reply-to-all to widely-distributed email with responses that shouldn’t involve everybody else. A common example is that someone sends out an email, “Welcome to Ben Bitdiddle who joined the Frobnication team!”, and then lots of people would reply-to-all with, “Welcome!” (And sometimes more people then would reply-to-all saying, “Please don’t reply-to-all!”)

As a little social experiment, I set up a dummy mailing list. Nobody was actually subscribed to it, but I sent out an email to it with the main engineering list (a significant portion of the company) BCC’d.

From: James Lin
To: email-test
BCC: [the main engineering mailing list]
Subject: Welcome to the “email-test” mailing list

Hello,

You have been subscribed to the email-test mailing list as one of many participants in an experiment that I will be performing. I will send out additional details later, but this test might involve a large volume of email being sent to you at various times of the day.

If you wish to participate, I first would like to know what email client you use. Please reply to me with one of “zimbra”, “outlook”, or “other” in the message body.

If you do not wish to participate, please reply to me with the word “unsubscribe” in the message body.

(I apologize for the wide distribution.)

Thanks,

– James

Everything in the email was a lie (except for the parts about performing an experiment and about apologizing for the wide distribution). Anyone who used reply-to-all received an automatic response from the email-test list:

You have failed the test.

You used reply-to-all instead of replying only to me. Had this been a real mailing list, you would have spammed a large portion of the company. Imagine if everyone else behaved that way.

Please be more conscientious in the future.

– James

About 1.6% of the respondents failed the test. (Since I sent it to an engineering list, I’m not surprised that the failure rate was so low.) Maybe it wasn’t worth it. (And I’m aware of the irony of spamming much of the company to address just a few people. Alas.)

Incidentally, about 35% of the respondents opted in, which was much, much higher than I had expected for an undisclosed experiment that supposedly would flood people’s mailboxes. That probably says something good about how helpful people are, or maybe it says something frightening about how much some people trust me (but maybe those people now will be more skeptical).

Despite the uninteresting results, almost all of the responses that I’ve received after revealing the true nature of the experiment have been very positive so far. At least one manager, however, was very unamused, complaining about my “misuse of company resources” and wanting to reprimand me for my “terribly poor judgment”.