Why?
- We tend to ignore things that are sent to large groups of people. The Reply All email must be relevant to someone else if it’s not intended directly at you.
- Reply All threads often fork into 2 or 3 separate conversations, wasting further time as you manage each part of the thread
- Reply All messages sent in anger can rebound on the sender and start a flame war
- Can you trust everyone on the ‘To:’ line not to propagate the message further?
- Is the message actually meant for each of the recipients?
- Are you wasting their time Replying to All?
Be productive – don’t hit that icon… It could come back and bite you…
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Eileen is a social business strategist, ZDNet columnist and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact her to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.
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Eileen's Digital Technology 
I used to use three or four measures for how much action a mail needed
(a) How far acrosss the organisation did it come from. A mail from my boss, or her boss trumped a mail from the C.E.O. If the C.E.O announced something I needed to do, the boss, boss’s boss and country boss would all remind me.
(b) How many recipients. Nothing which needed action from me had more than 100 recipients – see (a)
(c) Number of bytes and number of sentances. A mail which the sender has time to pretty up with graphics is, ipso facto, non-urgent. A mail with long rambling sentances tends to be non urgent.
(d) For fowarded / replied to mail – who forwarded it / to who / what did they add ? (see a,b, and c). Preview is invaluable If the addition was “FYI” and from the team member who signed up to obsurce lists and forward mails as a “keep alive beacon” it would go straight in the bin.
James,
And if all else fails — delete it anyway. They’ll get back to you if it’s that important 🙂
These tricks have certainly cut my email right down to a manageable level…