Okay, this isn’t so much a reply to all war story, but a hapless Bobette at our firm just inadvertently forwarded an attachment with a dodgey link to a bunch of agents - via an email to warn them of a phishing attempt making the rounds - so make her feel better (or worse) I shared this small gem. It’s older than alt.soc, but it still makes me smile:
Silly girl! LOL. You gave me a flashback: the moderators of an equine mailing list I was on years ago would occasionally broadcast “DO NOT OPEN EMAILS FROM ; THEY ARE INFECTED AND WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF NOTIFYING THEM”.
Unfortunately, this was almost always immediately followed by an email sent to the entire list: “DO NOT OPEN ANY EMAILS FROM ME; THE MODS HAVE TOLD ME MY COMPUTER IS INFECTED”. Erm, yeah…
Fortunately, it didn’t take long before the mods started unsubbing the affected participant from the list BEFORE they sent a virus warning. ;oD
What I didn’t also tell her, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell this group (but I will anyway, just for fun) is that all too often the resulting mayhem went on for several days worth of Reply-To-All’s, varying from amused to annoyed to apoplectic.
We learned that lesson at the hospital system. As super of the Help Desk, I was the designated sender of system-wide flash traffic.
After one intern (who had worked in one admin office, at corp headquarters, for a few weeks) said “goodbye” to THE ENTIRE BLOATED GOATS EMAIL LIST, the “All” lists were broken down into four (so not everyone would get one at once if our plan failed), given mundane names, and only the Notes admin and I knew them.
Plus we changed the names if we every suspected someone had cracked our code.
When I sent the mail blasts, I always, Always, ALWAYS sent the email to the Held Desk, bcc to the mailing list. At most we got replies to ourselves.
At my first real IT job we used Bloated Goats and the company-wide distribution list was locked. Whenever we needed to send something out we would unlock it, send the email blast, and lock it right back up again. Because damn, there would have been so much abuse otherwise.
Dunno why we couldn’t do that… maybe we were on a version that pre-dated that feature? This was almost 20 yr back.
Or they wanted to be able to send blasts outside my purview?
I wish to maintain the veil of anonymity, but my previous employer (technically previous x2) had a reply-all storm that took the company down for a day and made the news.
