From the “You Can’t Ever Have Too Much E-mail” Department
Google has introduced a new feature to Gmail users, including those using Google’s enterprise e-mail offering. We’ll let them tell you about it first.
From the Google Lab blog:
“When we’re working on features for Gmail, the email etiquette on the team is to reply all so everyone involved is kept in the loop. Mark was an intern here this past summer who got frustrated when he’d reply to an e-mail only to realize that he forgot to reply all and had to resend the message. Thus, this Labs feature, which makes reply all your default selection.”
Regular readers of this space know why using reply-to-all is a really bad idea as do members of the LifeHacker discussion forum. To wit:
“Oh god, I hope people at my office don’t find out about the reply-all default preference. I already get so, so many unnecessarily “reply-all”-ed e-mails it’s not even funny.”
“I have always hated reply-all, and now it can be a default? *I feel cold* ”
“Reply All… that brings back some fun memories from my days in Cubeland. I always enjoyed the 4 pages of quoted conversation, preceded by “Me too.”
“Setting Reply-to-All as the default should come with a big warning dialog advising the user that replying to all too many times can result serious injury or death, or at the very least, the recipients wishing these things upon you. Or maybe you should have to pass an e-mail etiquette test before being able to change the setting.”
Sachin Anand is a senior analyst at Basex.