Another email fail: You Can’t “Reply to All”
Nielsen, as in the company that does TV ratings and such, has removed the “reply to all” feature from their email client. Read more about it here in this article. Their theory is that removing the “reply to all” feature will force people to really think about who should be copied on the message. IF you want to continue the thread with all involved, you need to actually add their emails back into the message.
Ok. I get it. People run around “replying to all” like crazy and especially if you manage several people this can clutter up your inbox. People use the “reply to all” feature to do some major CYA and often times it’s more about that than it is about actually keeping people in the loop. If people could understand when to do a “reply to all” and learn basic email etiquette I think we would be able to solve a great deal of the email overload problems. But to artificially impose rules which force a one size fits all solution seems shortsighted and not well thought out. Maybe Nielsen should just hire smarter people who can understand email etiquette? 
Sabrina Parsons
CEO, Palo Alto Software
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Sorry man – totally not persuaded! 400 million people are using Microsoft Outlook in 400 million different ways. It should be easy to train basic etiquette in this environment – any many companies out there do – eg http://www.prioritymanagement.com.
BUT TRAINING DOESN’T WORK!
Reason? Because of the design of the software in the first place. It has cognitively patterned these folks to behave in this fashion – and getting rid of the Reply All is a key first step.
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This effort includes a strong commitment to community engage- ment. ,
Now we have the proof of the pudding thanks to you. ,