Companies Considering Elimination Of Wasteful "Reply All" E-Mail

Frustrated by the sheer quantity of e-mail you receive on a day-to-day basis? You aren't alone. Increasingly, employers are now looking for ways to lessen the e-mail load. While e-mail is no doubt important, largely taking the place of lengthy phone calls, there has yet to be much done to make e-mail a truly efficient system. In a way, it's like an uncontrolled IM session with potentially thousands of employees, which can become unmanageable in short order. Now, there's a movement starting to eliminate the possibility of hitting "Reply All." While some smaller companies that use things like hosted Gmail accounts probably won't have much luck, there's already a certain option for Outlook administrators that prevents the usage. Why? Because in many cases, the use of Reply All results in things like "Thanks!" being sent to countless individuals, further cluttering their inbox. In a sense, deleting the Reply All button would eliminate some of those inefficient messages.


Many larger firms like Wells Fargo and Nielsen have already taken steps to eliminate the usage, mostly in a bid to eliminate "bureaucracy and inefficiency." It's an interesting problem, because Reply All is most certainly useful in some situations. Perhaps the real solution is to come up with a solution to e-mail. Come to think of it, there's a startup idea to jump on...